creative
Learning
Edited by Julian Sefton-Green
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lotte Friedrich and Naranee Ruthra-Rajan for their help in
developing and supporting this project, and to all attendees of the
Creative Learning seminar hosted by Creative Partnerships on 13
February 2008.
Creative Partnerships is the Government's flagship creative learning
programme, designed to develop the skills of young people across
England, raising their aspirations and achievements, and opening up
more opportunities for their futures. This world-leading programme is
transforming teaching and learning across the curriculum.
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Contents
Contributors
4
Introduction: What is ‘Creative Learning’?
Julian Sefton-Green, David Parker and Naranee Ruthra-Rajan
7
1 From Learning to Creative Learning:
concepts and traditions
Julian Sefton-Green
15
2 Mixed messages or permissions and opportunities?
Reflections on current policy perspectives on creativity
in education
Pat Cochrane, Anna Craft and Graham Jeffery
27
3 Artists’ perspectives on art practice and pedagogy
Emily Pringle
41
4 Studio Thinking: A Model of Artistic Mind
Lois Hetland
51
5 Creative learning and new technology?
a provocation paper
Avril Loveless
61
6 The Assessment of Creative Learning
Sue Ellis and Myra Barrs
73
Contributors
Dr Myra Barrs worked as a teacher, a
Professor Anna Craft is Professor of
publisher and an English adviser before
becoming Director of the Centre for Literacy in
Primary Education (www.clpe.co.uk) where
she worked for over 20 years, developing
CLPE as an independent charity with an
international profile. Her other experience
includes consultancy for QCA and a visiting
Professorship at the University of East
London. She is now Associate Director of
Learning Through the Arts UK, an arts-based
education programme originating in Canada.
www.lttauk.com. Her particular interests
include early symbolisation, the teaching of
writing, and assessment, and she has
published extensively on all these topics. She
is part of the CLPE team which developed the
Creative Learning Assessment.
Education at the University of Exeter and The
Open University. Once a primary teacher, and
with a background in national curriculum
development work across the primary and
secondary range, Anna works with learners,
teachers, researchers and policymakers to
develop creativity and learning futures. She
has written and edited sixteen books on these
topics, is currently Lead Editor of Thinking
Skills and Creativity and co-convenes the
BERA Special Interest Group, Creativity in
Education. She leads the CREATE research
group at Exeter www.education.ex.uk/create
Pat Cochrane is CEO of Cape UK
(www.capeuk.org) an independent research
and development organisation in the field of
creativity and learning engaged in both
practice and policy. Pat has worked as
teacher, lecturer, community worker and
principal in community and tertiary education.
Pat now specialises in professional
development in relation to pedagogy for
creativity, reflective practice and leadership.
Cape UK has a long history of collaborative
work with Creative Partnerships, running
national CPD and action research
programmes. Pat contributed to the Roberts
Review Nurturing Creativity in Young People in
2005-06.
4
Creative learning
Sue Ellis is Director of the Centre for
Literacy in Primary Education
(www.clpe.co.uk). She was Director of the
research project Animating Literacy,
(Animating Literacy: Inspiring Children’s
Learning Through Teacher and Artist
Partnerships, CLPE 2005) and the projects:
Assessing Creative Learning (CLPE 2005-07)
and Creative Learning Assessment (2008).
She is co-author of The Primary Language
Record Handbook, Patterns of Learning and
The Guide to the Primary Learning Record
and has written publications on literacy
learning and teaching, including The Core
Book. She has worked as a consultant in the
USA and Hong Kong, and for the BBC,
Channel 4 and the British Council.
Professor Lois Hetland, Ed.D., is
Professor Avril Loveless is Professor
Associate Professor of Art Education at the
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and
Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard
Graduate School of Education. Trained in music
and visual arts and formerly an elementary and
middle school classroom teacher for 17 years,
she is currently Principal Investigator for an
ongoing project on arts teaching and learning in
Alameda County, CA, which uses Studio
Thinking (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, &
Sheridan, 2007). She recently finished a
collaborative project, the Quality of Qualities,
funded by the Wallace Foundation, to clarify
what constitutes high-quality teaching and
learning in arts education across all art forms.
of Education at the University of Brighton. She
is involved in teacher education and research
which focuses on how digital technologies
might be used as tools in learning and
teaching in a ‘Knowledge Society’. Her
particular area of interest is creativity and how
educators might promote opportunities for
people to develop creative approaches in their
learning. She has written and edited many
books and articles in the area, and was the
senior editor of the international journal
Technology, Pedagogy and Education.
Dr Graham Jeffery is a Reader in the
School of Media, Languages and Music at the
University of the West of Scotland. His career
has spanned secondary, further and higher
education, twelve years of which were based at
Newham Sixth Form College and the University
of East London, where he led the NESTAfunded Pathways into Creativity project. He is a
consultant and composer working with a range
of organisations including Cape UK, the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, LIFT and the
Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. Most
recently he has been a lead tutor and
researcher on the Teacher Artist Partnership
Programme, a London-based professional
development programme for artists and
teachers in collaboration. Graham contributed to
the Roberts Review Nurturing Creativity in
Young People in 2005-06.
Dr David Parker is Research Director for
Creative Partnerships, an initiative established
in 2002. It is the Government’s flagship
creative learning programme which aims to
develop the creativity of young people,
teachers and schools, transforming their
aspirations and achievements. Previously, he
was Head of Research at the British Film
Institute where he worked on a number of
projects exploring the relationships between
moving image media and print literacy. Past
publications include, with Dr Andrew Burn,
Analysing Media Texts, (Continuum, 2003), a
social semiotic examination of visual literacy
across a variety of moving image media. He is
on the editorial panel of the journal,
Educational Action Research.
Creative learning
5
Dr Emily Pringle trained as a painter and
Dr Julian Sefton-Green is an
worked for several years in gallery education.
Since 1998 Emily has researched and
evaluated visual arts practice and arts
education work. Notable projects include
research into forms of engagement between
artists, participants and others for Arts Council
England. She has undertaken research and
evaluation for, amongst others, the Tate
Gallery, the National Gallery, Serpentine
Gallery and Creative Partnerships. Emily has
recently completed her PhD at The Institute of
Education, University of London which
addresses the role of the artist within
contemporary gallery education.
independent consultant and researcher
working in Education and the Cultural and
Creative Industries. He is a special professor
of Education at the University of Nottingham,
UK, and an Adjunct Associate Research
Professor at the University of South Australia.
He has been the Head of Media Arts and
Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media
College www.wac.co.uk and worked as a
Media Studies teacher in an inner city
comprehensive. He has researched and
written widely on many aspects of media
education, new technologies and informal
learning and has directed research projects for
the Arts Council of England, the British Film
Institute, the London Development Agency and
Creative Partnerships
www.julianseftongreen.net
Naranee Ruthra-Rajan is the
Research Officer for Creative Partnerships, an
initiative established in 2002. It is the
Government’s flagship creative learning
programme which aims to develop the
creativity of young people, teachers and
schools, transforming their aspirations and
achievements. Naranee has experience of
working within a variety of cultural and
research organisations including British Film
Institute, Arts Council England and BOP
Consulting.
6
Creative learning
creative
introduction:
what is ‘creative
learning’?
Julian Sefton-Green, David Parker and
Naranee Ruthra-Rajan
Context
Although Creative Partnerships began as a programme in 2002, it
was conceived in response to Ken Robinson’s report All Our Futures
published in 1999. Over its first two years, Creative Partnerships
began to explore the intersections between creativity, culture and
education and in around 2005 the term ‘creative learning’ came to
stand as a shorthand description for Creative Partnerships’
contribution to school change, curriculum development and teaching
and learning practices. Whilst one phrase is never quite going to
sum up an entire programme, Creative Partnerships believed that the
term captured its mission, significantly because of its attention to the
learner, given how the programme has always been concerned to
place the voice of the young person at the heart of its activities1.
This booklet continues to explore the notion of
creative learning. The term is perhaps still not
widely used but, like the idea of creativity itself,
it is a kind of common-sense summing up of
an aspiration, if not a precise scientific
understanding. Whilst the essays here
interrogate the idea of creative learning
seriously, the authors also acknowledge a
necessary looseness to the term. While it may
not always lead to the formation of final
answers it consistently takes teachers and
learners into new, challenging and positive
spaces. The arguments contained here are not
prescriptive, rather they try to unpick core
values, principles and ambitions to describe
and better understand a broad field of activity.
This search for focus reflects how in the last
six years, as Creative Partnerships has
become more confident in how it works, it has
tried to define its unique mix of activities in a
more systematic fashion. Creative
Partnerships did not originally offer a single
format or programme of activity or intervention
but worked tactically at local levels, utilising
expertise and working to need in a range of
1 See the Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships Research Project: http://www.open.ac.uk/education-andlanguages/people/people-profile.php?staff_id=1890925&show=researchInterests
8
Creative learning
school contexts. From 2008 these
interventions have been structured around
three levels of programme offer. Creative
Partnerships’ national strategies and the
common use of a self-evaluation framework
have more explicitly described Creative
Partnerships interventions in terms of
promoting ‘creative learning’. Coming out of a
set of writings in educational research, (e.g.
Cropley, 2001) this has proven a successful
and attractive headline or banner around
which Creative Partnerships has mobilised;
and within Creative Partnerships the term
appears to offer a common language and
shared set of values.
However this phraseology does give rise to a
set of questions: is the new formulation a way
of talking about activity or values or does it
offer a precise ‘forensic’ script defining kinds of
interventions? In what ways does creative
learning underpin all of Creative Partnerships
activities or is it aspirational? And finally, in
those cases where it seems to be agreed that
creative learning is taking place, what sets of
indicators do we have of its impact and
process? Is there any way that Creative
Partnerships might develop the capability to
evaluate progression in creative learning?
In February 2008 Creative Partnerships
convened a seminar of experts to tease out
and investigate these issues 2. Participants
were asked to consider a deliberately robust
set of questions:
• can we define creative learning as distinct
from other notions of ‘learning’?
• if we can, what might be the value of doing
so?
• and if agreed, would any potentially useful
models of progression be available and
useful?
Although the event initially aimed to offer back
clear policy advice to Creative Partnerships
about how it should develop the creative
learning agenda explicitly addressing how or
whether Creative Partnerships should develop
models of progression in creative learning, this
may have been trying to run before we could
walk. More fundamentally, if Creative
Partnerships has essentially taken its own
journey from ‘pilot’ to ‘programme’ how can it
ensure it continues to give practitioners the
kind of reflective space needed to work out
what this formulation may be adding to the
pressure-cooker of curriculum reform? Finding
the balance between structure and flexibility
will be an ongoing challenge for us, but
virtually all of the essays here suggest that
concentrating on assessment is a helpful lens
with which to review the concept of creative
learning in the first place.
This booklet publishes the papers presented at
this event and a more general discussion. The
essays lay out a series of challenges and
contexts for Creative Partnerships and the
creative and education sectors in general.
Themes and arguments
The booklet opens with an essay by SeftonGreen discussing the intellectual and
academic traditions lying behind the idea of
creative learning. Although in many ways
Creative Partnerships derives from an earlier
more established tradition of Arts Education,
as Cochrane et al make clear in their
subsequent essay, the attention to creativity as
both part of the process of learning and the
2 A list of seminar participants can be found on page 13
Creative learning
9
qualities that seek to be instilled in young
people, position the initiative very much in its
time. Our current emphasis on cultural and
creative industries as well as the need to
prepare for work in the new information or
creative economy, position Creative
Partnerships at the cutting edge of attempts to
thoroughly ‘modernise’ education for
tomorrow’s societies. This volume does not
have the scope to explore these larger sociopolitical questions but the essay does try to
show how the idea of creative learning fuses
three distinct traditions. First he discusses the
distinct and conjoined traditions of learning
within discrete art forms (mainly drama and
visual arts) and how such separate traditions
have become entwined in a more general
notion of arts education; secondly, the current
attention to the presentation of the self in
schools and how creative learning supports
the making of a different kind of student; and
thirdly, those psychological traditions which
focus on developing the mind.
The essay by Cochrane et al looks at creative
learning in the context of contemporary and
recent policy pronouncements. The authors
trace the place of creativity across a range of
education and young people centred
legislation, and explore its place in a range of
policy pronouncements and implementation
discourses. Whilst their piece takes a slightly
broader look at creativity, rather than
exclusively focusing on creative learning per
se, the essay shows how the topic is a key
concern in recent political thinking albeit one
which is open to a range of interpretation. The
essay offers a valuable survey of the range
and scope of how creativity now appears a
central value in education and social policy
and although the authors are concerned that
10
Creative learning
such aspirations should be backed up with
investment and activity, it points to the
mainstreaming of notions of creativity as a
central principle of educational interventions.
Emily Pringle has conducted original research
exploring artists’ perspectives about their work
in education and her piece both extrapolates
how artists‘ ways of working model a kind of
creative learning and also show how
introducing such practices to young people can
affect ways of thinking about teaching, learning
and classroom activities. This attention to the
material activities of doing and thinking helps
us locate creative learning as a grounded
series of actions and helps us concretise some
of the abstractness that inevitably creeps into
discussions about creativity. Pringle’s work
helps us contextualise grand aspirations in the
nitty-gritty of classroom activity and messiness
of much artists’ work. The piece also warns us
against fetishising artists as having a privileged
or exclusive insight into creativity and
encourages us to be careful that in our
enthusiasm to introduce artists and other adults
into schools we don’t lose sight of the role that
teachers play.
Lois Hetland’s contribution reflects on her use
of an important publication, Studio Thinking
which she has developed along with
colleagues (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, &
Sheridan, 2007). This is a systematic attempt
to reflect on how artists’ working can be
translated programmatically into the classroom
and is built on research into such partnerships.
Not only does she enumerate the principles
and practices of such processes, but she
explores how such findings can be taken into
classrooms. Her is work is valuable not just for
the originality of the primary research but
because it also helps understand what kinds of
further training and investment are necessary
if we want to scale up the processes we care
about.
A key theme in Hetland’s piece is how the
principles and practices of assessment and
evaluation inform our understanding of
creative learning and this theme underpins the
final contributions. Avril Loveless explores
creative learning with new technologies. Like
Creativity, Information Communications
Technology (ICT), has been at the forefront of
dreams to change education systems and
schools around the world. Loveless introduces
us to key ways of thinking about leaning with
and through ICT. Her review of the impact of
the creative uses of new technologies,
although conducted in respect of a sister
discipline, support both Cochrane et al and
Hetland’s analysis of the core fundamental
principles of creative behaviour. Much of this,
all three authors argue, comes down to how
learning is assessed and valued.
The final contribution by authors at the Centre
for Language in Primary Education (CLPE)
takes this challenge head on. They report on a
project working with primary teachers
developing a framework for assessing creative
learning. It describes both the principles of
assessment and how these were derived from
current curriculum thinking as well as how the
actual practices of assessment were
developed with teachers. Not only does the
account base its analysis of assessment in an
understanding of ‘deep’ learning but also it
shows how implementing new forms of
assessment in this area can actually work to
stimulate interesting and vibrant practice in the
classroom. It also points to the sorts of work
that needs to be done if creative learning is
going to become a meaningful option for many
children and young people.
Challenges
Many of the pieces collected here reference
and describe a common contradiction, one
that fuels much of the work of Creative
Partnership: is creative learning when
described and evaluated in the ways the
authors here suggest, actually compatible with
how schools are currently organised? The
essays imply that there are unresolved
systemic issues which prevent creative
learning making more of a long-lasting
impression in common practice for these kinds
of reasons. The reasons for this are many and
discussed in several of the chapters, ranging
from the emphasis on teaching for terminal
exams to large classes and non-individualised
projects. Clearly, though, Creative Partnerships
has been making some progress in this
regard, and the more structured programme
on offer from 2008 will contribute to testing out
possible resolutions to such systemic issues.
One key arena this seeming contradiction
plays out in, as is already suggested, is that of
assessment. Not only is it suggested that the
current approach to valuing learning in
mainstream education may inhibit the
development of creative learning in general (in
that it sways how schools set their priorities),
but that it may also have the effect of deskilling teachers (and students) from
understanding how other kinds of learning
might be valued and developed. The work of
Hetland or the CLPE goes some way in
beginning to address this deficit and offers
alternative ways of understanding how we
could re-structure teaching and learning.
Creative learning
11
Together these two concerns raise the spectre
that a key function of creative learning is not
simply to describe other ways of organising
leaning but also to act as an irritant – as a
positively disruptive agent – because creative
learning models other and different ways of
carrying out what is perceived as the status
quo. Here it should be considered that a key
virtue of creative learning is that it acts in a
way that can raise questions about structural
or systemic tensions.
The essays collected here, are, it should be
stressed, more focused in their ambitions.
Whilst it is undeniable that collected together
they raise these larger questions, their remit
and the focus of this booklet makes such
questions more of an implicit than an explicit
challenge. This then leaves us trying to work
out whether creative learning offers solutions
to these kinds of problems or can it only raise
further challenges? In reality will ideas of
creative learning only seek to trouble how
evaluation is currently conducted or does it
offer new ways of solving long term difficulties
inherent in the education system at large? It
also begs the question as to whether creative
learning has to involve some element of
critique within it? Is being creative incompatible
with being critical or are they two sides of the
same coin?
Framing problems is of course a good way to
start solving them and whilst creative learning
is clearly an experience in itself and, as
suggested by several authors, capable of
being developed further, it may be that one of
its first achievements is to help teachers and
policy makers who want to develop change
and encourage other ways of learning, to
imagine and describe alternative possibilities.
12
Creative learning
Creative Partnerships has clearly touched a
deep chord with many teachers and schools
around the country. It has garnered cross-party
political support and much of this in no small
measure stems from how creative learning
offers a banner under which many different
colleagues have rallied. Whilst it may be an
imprecise term, it does stand for a set of
values focused around developing individual
potential and with an emphasis on authentic
‘deep’ educational experiences. These papers
may not offer solutions to all of the challenges
they raise, but in exploring and unpicking the
notion of creative learning they model the
essence of the process as it plays out in
schools – each author refreshes and renews
the interrogation of an idea in the same way
creative practitioners, teachers and young
people might re-imagine the curriculum within
schools.
References
Cropley, A. J. (2001). Creativity in Education
and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and
Educators. London: Routledge Falmer.
Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., &
Sheridan, K. M. (2007). Studio Thinking: The
Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. New
York: Teachers' College Press.
National Advisory Committee on Creative and
Cultural Education (NACCCE) (1999). All Our
Futures. Department for Education and
Employment and Department for Culture,
Media and Sport. London: DfEE.
List of attendees at Creative Learning seminar on 13 February 2008
Shakuntala
Banaji
Institute of Education, University of London
Pat
Cochrane
CAPE UK
Paul
Collard
Creative Partnerships
Anna
Craft
University of Exeter and The Open University
Sue
Ellis
Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE)
Walker
Ewart
Education and Training Inspectorate, Northern Ireland
Dorothy
Faulkner
Open University
Lotte
Friedrich
Creative Partnerships
Maurice
Galton
University of Cambridge
Bethan
Gritten
Creative Partnerships
Joe
Hallgarten
Creative Partnerships
Valerie
Hannon
The Innovation Unit
Lois
Hetland
Project Zero, Harvard University
Sue
Horner
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA)
Mary
James
Teaching & Learning Research Programme
Graham
Jeffrey
University of the West of Scotland
Avril
Loveless
University of Brighton
Jackie
Marsh
Sheffield University
Chris
May
Creative Partnerships
Peter
Muschamp
Jonothan
Neelands
University of Warwick
David
Parker
Creative Partnerships
Emily
Pringle
L C Associates
Naranee
Ruthra-Rajan
Creative Partnerships
Julian
Sefton-Green
Pat
Thomson
University of Nottingham
Alice
Young
Trinity Guildhall, Arts Award
Creative learning
13
concepts
1
from learning to
creative learning:
concepts and
traditions
Julian Sefton-Green
This chapter aims to sketch out three different theoretical traditions
lying behind the idea of creative learning. The argument is that
creative learning as an idea (or ideal) represents at this point in time,
a synthesis of these traditions. Whether the yoking together of these
three approaches is producing a true synthesis or merely a kind of
temporary ‘compound’, only time will tell. On one level it will be a test
of Creative Partnerships’ lasting impact. Whilst practice on the
ground will probably offer an emphasis from one or other of these
models, it is interesting to see how the contemporary thrust of
creative learning may be bringing about a new kind of fusion of
these ideas; and historically, creative learning may then say more
about our times’ distinctive hopes for education.
By way of scene setting the chapter will begin
by laying out some general principles about
learning. After all, distinguishing between good
learning, creative learning and learning is on
one level a question of semantics and the
contributors to this volume want to move
beyond such concerns to explore the
ambitions of deeper levels of engagement. It
then explores three approaches to learning
which use ideas of creativity. First, the different
models of creative learning embedded in
approaches derived from Arts Education.
These mainly include (sub-)traditions derived
from Drama and from Visual Arts, as both sets
of disciplines have spawned what can only be
called their own epistemological frameworks
as they exemplify different ways of knowing
about the world. The chapter will also consider
how generalised notions of arts education
derive from ways in which these disciplinary
approaches have been fused and synthesized.
The chapter then moves on to consider other
traditions which take related but separate
approaches to creative learning. Our second
approach is a kind of neo-behaviourism and I
16
Creative learning
look at how certain kinds of personal attributes
and behaviours are now seen as desirable
outcomes of education – especially those
which relate to the outcomes of creative
activities. This approach sees it as the purpose
of schools to ‘make’ certain kinds of individuals
and certain kinds of personalities, and that
these are also seen as necessary for the
changing nature of work, especially that found
in the growing sector of the creative economy.
It should be noted that scholars who have
written about this tradition tend to offer
diametrically opposed interpretations of this
approach. Because it is a relatively new
formulation, there isn’t the same expansive
range of discussion and evaluation as there is
around, for example, the arts education
paradigms.
This question of scholarly partiality also affects
our third approach: developing creative
thinking. Because this approach is framed in
cognitive terms and because it is focused on a
more psychological paradigm, namely
developing the mind through repeated
activities and exercises, and is indeed
‘measured’ as such, it does not receive equal
attention from across the scholarly spectrum.
Not only does this mean that writing about
such approaches is more difficult, but it should
also be acknowledged that it also derives
legitimacy and meaning from a kind of folk
wisdom – attitudes to how you make children
more creative in this way are often engrained
and populist – rather than scientific. This is not
necessarily a comment on their validity but a
warning that we can’t always compare like with
like because the evidence base is
incommensurate. This point is important in
considering how ideas of creative learning
derive legitimacy and possibly why they have
been taken up by different political interests an issue that will form part of the conclusion to
this chapter.
Learning in general
This section is concerned with how (or if)
notions of creative learning differ from theories
of learning in general or whether ideas of
creative learning offer a different theory of
learning in and of themselves. In very general
terms there are two kinds of ways in which we
theorise how learning works. The first derives
from behaviourism; and the second is broadly
cognitive including both socio-cultural
approaches and types of constructivism.
Behaviourist theories broadly suggest that we
learn from imitation and practice; while sociocultural theories suggest that the mind creates
meaning though interaction with experiences
and symbolic tools – of which the most
important is language. In reality, and day-today in most schools, we use a variety of these
approaches and over time both approaches
have fluctuated in influence over the last
century, and have been refined and distilled by
countless theorists. In general, and again I am
cautious about making generalisations, people
tend to associate behaviourist theories with
young children and the cognitive sort with
older children and young people. Cognitive
theories tend to be associated with ‘higherorder’ more complex thinking.
The other factor influencing how we imagine
learning derives from psychological theories of
child development. Most proponents of models
of child development, tend to follow notions of
linear, block-by-block development or
progression. This is sometimes associated
Creative learning
17
with age-related stages of mental
development, of which Piaget’s notions of
human development are the most well known
(Boden, 1995).
I have reprised these broad principles here
because all contemporary theories of creative
learning either explicitly or implicitly engage
with these traditions either to align themselves
within a particular way of thinking or, and this
is a key role for creative learning, to act as a
way of troubling and reconceptualising these
dominant common sense ways of thinking
about learning.
I now want to suggest that the key traditions in
arts-learning in effect model the deep
narratives of socio-cultural theories of learning
and to that extent also contain within them a
similar hierarchy of values (that is moving from
experience through forms of mediation to
reflection). Again to generalise: socio-cultural
theories of learning stress how the developing
mind works in an active fashion, making
meaning. Vygotsky, (1986; 1978) shows how
children move from 'spontaneous' to 'scientific'
concepts through the use of specialised
language and through structured and
scaffolded support. Within this tradition
learning isn’t just about the acquisition of
knowledge (although this is not to minimise the
role of context and being enculturated into
societies’ key ways of knowing) but privileging
certain kinds of ‘higher’ intellectual capacities.
This usually involves possession of a
specialised discourse and the capacity to
reflect and critique, to offer different
perspectives and to offer abstract analysis. In
a sense, I suggest most notions of arts
learning follow this model even if the routes to
such understanding are often conceived as far
18
Creative learning
more experiential, and I should acknowledge
here, not quite as ‘developmental’ as it is
usually conceptualised. By this I mean that
despite these notions of a hierarchical valuechain moving from the concrete to the
abstract, learning in arts is not always solely
and exclusively valued by a privileged endposition of abstract reflection. These questions
about developmental and other progressions
should become clearer by the end of the next
section.
Arts Education/Visual Arts
The key issue to raise here is the generality of
an idea of creative learning. Given that many
scholars have questioned whether the Arts as
an aggregated plural really means anything at
all (for an overview see Fleming, 2008), a
preliminary question must be to distinguish
between creative and arts learning and within
the first of these categories to work out if we
are talking about an Art–based theory of
learning (in the singular) or an Arts-based
theory. It is worthwhile recalling that the
contributors to this volume tend to represent
discrete traditions within this matrix of ideas.
Eisner notes that some of his generalisations
about the nature of both the aesthetic
experience and his theories of learning and
the arts are derived from his own discipline –
that of fine art (Eisner, 2002). Other scholars
are also often careful not to rush into wider
claims about learning and the Arts. Hetland’s
piece in this volume deriving from her larger
co-authored project (Hetland, Winner,
Veenema, & Sheridan, 2007) belongs in this
sceptical tradition. Despite these caveats
Hetland et al and Eisner have thought-through
developed theories of art-learning that offer
themselves as holistic theories of learning in
general. The same ambition is also evident in
the work of Kieran Egan. His best known
book, The Educated Mind (Egan, 1997) also
located fundamental ways of knowing in an
arts-based domain. Egan is interested in the
imagination and has developed a sociohistorical theory of human development which
locates language (in its different expressive
modes from somatic through oral to written) as
a cognitive tool. Egan, it is worth noting,
derives from a literary tradition, of writing and
poetry and theatre so again his background
too is from one discrete art form.
It is here that we can see more generic
connections between these theories of artslearning and socio-cultural traditions of
learning. Both the Egan and the
Eisner/Hetland et al approaches implicitly and
explicitly model a progression (only sometimes
expressed as a hierarchy) which privileges
meta-reflective and distanced forms of
understanding built on ‘spontaneous’
experiential understanding. Egan talks about
ironic discourse while the visual–arts traditions
place at one end of their concrete/abstract
continua, the value of critique and reflection.
We can see here how such approaches show
great affinity with the mainstream educational
thinking that builds on Vygotskian principles
(Vygotsky, 1986 and see Bruner, 1996).
Although the visual arts and imagination
models possess their own specificity, they both
prioritise the role of language and a way of
reflecting on experiences in an iterative fashion
leading to deeper understanding. Other writers
for example (Pope, 2005) have located the
epistemological orientation of these
approaches in prevailing philosophical
traditions which privilege the intellectual, the
abstract and the values of perception and
distanciation.
Arts Education/Drama
However, within the ‘family’ of arts learning
traditions, it is interesting to compare how
notions of drama learning offer an alternative
tradition. Whilst a history of drama education,
shows how the field has steered a course
between very different ideological positions
(from speech ‘elocution’ to theatre to child
theatre and so on), a key principle of drama
learning is that it is experiential and subjectivist
(Bolton 2007). Of course in several
manifestations, theories of Drama learning, like
the visual and literary arts traditions described
above, also suggest that reflection on
experience draws attention to a meta-reflexive
position – which is also valued as an end of
learning. However, possibly because so much
of the construction of social reality, especially
in theories of persona and masks (Goffman,
1959), is itself derived from a dramatic
construct of social activity, there is more value
attributed to unmediated experience. In other
words understanding different perspectives
from within different roles, developing
empathy, is also an end in itself – rather than
only and necessarily having to lead to a
reflexive and critical position.
I am not trying to create artificial distinctions
between drama and visual arts learning,
although I think that in practice the two
traditions are not co-terminus. They do have in
common the socio-cultural claim which crudely
implies that reflection on experience, mediated
through a specialist discourse is ultimately how
learning works. But they also value
Creative learning
19
experiential ways of finding out, in the studio
through experimentation, and in drama
through role (also a kind of play-experiment).
Different traditions in each approach offer
different roles for the teacher; in both child art
and child drama we can see examples of
transmission as much as we can see types of
learning through doing.
What of course both the drama and the visual
arts approaches do possess - and this is
where they depart from general theories of
learning – are practices, traditions and indeed
current forms of economic production relating
to their sphere, e.g. painting, theatre etc.
Again both traditions share differences and
similarities in their attitudes to these facts.
They both offer a craft based approach and
use forms of apprenticeship, professional
modelling and initiation into professional
practices. They both draw on traditions of
'communities of practice', going back to the
Renaissance studio or the travelling troupe of
commedia del arte players. They both can
offer employment and real-world experiences
within the marketplaces of the school play or
exhibition. The very practical traditions behind
approaches in both drama and visual arts do
give both subjects a grounded reality and this
domain specificity is more particular than many
other subjects. Funnily enough it is easier to
understand what artists or actors do, than
scientists or geographers (or I guess writers).
For all the exclusivity in the arts as careers,
they are far more accessible and easy to
imagine than many other professions –
perhaps even more so in our age of culture
and this lends their practices an easy
applicability to young learners. If this is the
case, it is not just the nature of the
20
Creative learning
epistemological strategies, being in role or
learning by doing, which makes learning in the
arts any more creative, but tradition and
relevance. It is the social nature of arts
practices which makes their modes of knowing
successful, and not necessarily inherent
cognitive processes.
Ultimately, both approaches also share an
existential set of values, and offer themselves
as a way of knowing. This can be and has
been set against scientific curiosity or indeed a
sociological imagination as deep and profound
ways to understand the world. Nobody in their
right mind would ever really claim priority for
any one of these approaches, but they do
inspire fierce loyalty and a kind of educational
partisanship where aficionados claim
singularity. This is untenable if pushed to
extremes in the way that John Carey analyses
in his study of Art and the ’silly’
pronouncements of some artists (Carey,
2006), although the enthusiasm and motivation
of teachers will clearly translate into exciting
classrooms; and again the marginal status of
much arts practice may paradoxically act as a
significant precursor to engagement. Similarly,
the specialised nature of arts practices and
their difference from other approaches in
school also work in their favour offering the
simple attraction of being other-than-the-norm.
This is always appealing.
Creative people
Although there is no doubt that ‘hard’
outcomes from education, that is to say
qualifications, are ‘necessary’ criteria for entry
into work and act as a key ‘sorting’
mechanism, allocating roles to young people
as they enter the labour force, they are in and
of themselves not ‘sufficient’ as a way of
judging employability. Indeed from the middle
of the 1990s, there have been attempts by
both employers’ pressure groups as well as in
education policy to recognise that ‘soft skills’
are crucial and play a complementary role to
qualifications in determining success both at
interview and at work. Whist there are
important differences between discussions of
soft skills and creative learning there are key
overlaps, especially around working
collaboratively, in teams, negotiation skills,
problem solving and communicating and
making presentations.
It is true that much Arts education markets its
own distinctive qualities using the same
language. However, embedded within the
overarching aim of making certain behaviours
the desired outcome of education, and in
relating this quite specifically to employability
and contemporary trends in labour force
needs, is the distinct idea of finding a new kind
of identity. This is well summed up in a recent
speech by David Lammy:
Learning soft skills is part of a process of
coming to terms with the world around us,
which continues through nursery school,
primary and secondary school and into
adult life. Indeed, how to relate to and
communicate with other people is
something we never stop learning.
In the workplace, employers are looking for
bright, able individuals, who are passionate
about what they do. Who, as well as having
a good understanding of the job, can work
in a team, find creative solutions to
problems, and treat others with respect.
CBI [Confederation of Business Industry]
say that businesses consistently rank this
as one of their most enduring problems.
Who can blame them? We have all been
irritated with those who lack soft skills: the
autocratic boss who can't motivate his staff,
the team member who is always late or the
pupil who always answers back.
DWP [Department for Work and Pensions]
research shows that overall, employers are
less demanding of technical skills,
considering them trainable, if candidates
exhibit employability, soft skills, and positive
attributes. (Lammy, 2008).
From our point of view it seems clear that
being creative is integral to this approach and
in other kinds of description, these kinds of
behaviours are part and parcel of what it
means to be a creative person. Thus in Sean
Nixon’s ethnography of advertising, the ability
to behave in this way merges with the more
neo-bohemian character-types that strut
through the pages of studies of creative
workers at the cutting edge of the cultural
economy (Ross, 2003; Lloyd, 2005). Lammy’s
argument is also borne out by recent surveys
of the UK labour force showing how arts
graduates do in fact appear to utilise these
kinds of skills across a wide gamut of
employment opportunities as can be seen
from the UK graduate careers website3.
If we were being pedantic we might ask if it
might be possible to possess these sorts of
soft skills and not be creative, just as it should
be asked if all forms of arts learning are
implicitly or explicitly creative. DEMOS makes
this assumption valuing adaptability and
creativity equally and make the case that
3 http://www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/ShowPage/Home_page/What_do_graduates_do_2005/Arts_creative_arts_humanities_editorial/
p!ecdXejg
Creative learning
21
these values lie at the heart of a modern or
contemporary skillset (DEMOS, 2007). Indeed,
it is clear that many descriptions of the outputs
of education now characterise different kinds
of behaviours and personality attributes in this
way. The Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority’s (QCA) current review of curriculum
models talks of ‘successful learners who
(amongst others things) are creative,
resourceful and able to identify and solve
problems’ (QCA, 2008).
Overall, this attention is focused on producing
a certain type of person, who possesses
personal ‘attitudes and attributes’, and is
‘confident’ and ‘successful’ (these descriptions
are from the QCA Big Picture, 2008). The
DEMOS report for NESTA referred to above
recognises that these character abilities are as
likely to be learnt elsewhere:
The report also looks at the influences on
young people and where they learn most
from. 'Parents and family' were identified
ahead of school (39 per cent vs. 37 per
cent), showing the importance of both
formal and informal learning environments
(NESTA, 2007 press release).
This raises very deep questions about identity,
socialisation and how our subjectivities are
formed. Furthermore, an attention to
personality and character not only re-frames
the moral purpose of education in
contemporary ways, but it also exemplifies
how modern society produces forms of
subjectivity appropriate to its economic needs.
We should also note how these forms of
creative behaviour are bound up with certain
class-bound ways of behaving and that
maybe, talking about creative behaviour is no
22
Creative learning
more than cipher for talking about certain kinds
of middle-class attributes. In the QCA,
Personal, Learning and Thinking framework
(2007), for example, the phrase ‘self-manager’
is used to describe a notion of an individual’s
efficacy. The studies of the new creative class
and the bohemian work this entails (as
referenced above), demonstrate these forms
of subjectivity in greater detail. A meta review
carried out in 2007 found evidence of an
attention to these new forms of subjectivity in
twenty innovative curriculum development
projects around the world (Facer & Pykett,
2007). Again, my purpose here is not
necessarily to engage with these arguments
but to trace how the different discourses of
creative learning have come into being and
how the older value of arts learning have
become overlaid with this new value-set. I do
want to stress its behaviourist rationale, that
unlike the socio-cultural traditions outlined at
the beginning of this chapter, this approach is
more about imitation and modelling and also
how it is about producing certain kinds of
individuals. Of course it could be argued that
this kind of behaviour, modelling, is
antipathetic to definitions of authentic creativity,
but on the other hand, in paying attention to
what makes people effective in the workplace,
it could be countered that this type of
education is harnessing hitherto untapped
potential.
Creative thinking
This idea of untapped potential underpins our
final section in the anatomy of contemporary
creative learning as it looks at how
psychological and popular brain science
discourse has also infused the field. The
argument here is that psychometric
approaches to developing intellectual
processes effectively releases potential and
facilitates the development of more productive
creative thinking. Despite the fact that serious
neuroscientists stress that our knowledge of
how the brain works is still in its infancy and
that we are a long way from what is described
as 1:1 correspondences – that is a simple
model of mapping input to the brain against
output or performance – such ideals are a
popularly held belief.
Creative thinking basically consists of ways to
improve thinking or cognitive skills often
through exercises and drills. These cognitive
capacities are broken down into discrete
elements, memory, cognitive processing, logic,
intuition, problem solving, brainstorming and
so on. Mark Runco’s recent review of theories
of creativity and learning (Runco, 2007)
suggests that in fact this is quite an old view of
how people have theorised the relationship of
creativity to intelligence and details a range of
research investigating this. He concludes that
the main finding about research into creativity
and thinking (cognition) is its diversity and
suggests that in fact the research is not so
much inconclusive as representative of the
different metaphors of mind fashionable at
different eras and across different societies
(Runco, 2007: 37). Much of the research is
attractive because it suggests that we can
become more creative, that there are
processes under our control although some
studies of genius and exceptionality can also
be profoundly un-generative for education
policy as they identify kinds of individual
difference. On the other hand other studies of
genius actually offer extrapolations as a kind of
wisdom to improve all of us, as is suggested in
the work of popular psychologists and their
output4.
However, it is the prospect of deep change
that has helped such ideas gain currency.
Indeed, an extraordinary amount of folk
knowledge accretes around the idea of
developing creative thinking. Ideas of creative
learning tap into these folk-theories even if
their basis in fact is more contentious than
other knowledge bases. Indeed, the power of
a belief in creative thinking (and possibly
creative learning) is that it over-rides and
short-circuits the perceived negative attributes
of regular school learning. The recent
controversy over Brain Gym and especially its
critical review in The Guardian (Goldacre,
2006) exemplifies this tension between forms
of popular and formal knowledge. There are
indeed many popular kinds of
creativity/cognitive development approaches
on offer in the marketplace and they feed off
more scientific studies onto the popular
imagination5.
Again, like the discussion of art and arts
learning or creative behaviour, I am not so
concerned here with the relative truthfulness of
any individual claims about the elements of
creative learning, but I want to show how
popular and disenfranchised values have
come together to create a rhetoric of
empowerment and change in learning which
drives forward contemporary aspirations of the
role of education in our society.
Conclusion
This chapter has made the argument that the
idea of creative learning, as it has been
4 See, for example, http://www.creativethinking.net/WP05_Articles.htm Titles include Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking
Techniques (Michael Michalko, 2006) and Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius (Michael Michalko, 2001).
5 See for example http://www.positscience.com/science/studies_results/cognitive_interventions/IMPACT_Study/
Creative learning
23
developed and used in the last few years has
developed as an amalgam of several
historically discrete traditions: art /arts learning,
self-management, and creative thinking. Each
of these ideas is actually located in very
different paradigms of learning, so fusing them
together creates awkward tensions and
inconsistencies. However, as a single idea,
creative learning represents a very
contemporary aspiration to fit young people for
a vision of the future which is situated in a
progressive creative economy. It also
embodies a series of values and deep beliefs
about human nature and personal
development, which although at odds with
some social scientific models, again derive
their legitimacy from their popularity and broad
principles. We should not underestimate the
power of these frames as they help position
creative learning as a desirable aspiration at
the heart of our education system.
Like many abstract arguments we cannot
extrapolate how things work out in practice as
day-to-day lessons in the classroom are likely
to be a mix and match of different approaches,
and much teaching is pragmatic and uses
what works rather than following the book.
Equally there is often a disjuncture between
many teachers’ theoretical explanations of
their practices and how they are evaluated
day-to- day. The fact that the creative thinking
and creative learning approaches described
above have popular weight may mean that
they are advanced as explanations and
justifications for activities whose origins lie in
the older arts learning traditions. In other
words, even though we might arrive at
definitions of creative learning, it may be that
what actually happens in classrooms only
bears a tangential relationship to underpinning
rationales when looked at in practice.
24
Creative learning
In a way a key theme to this chapter has been
that we need to think carefully about how or
whether we can make claims about creative
learning that distinguish it from learning in
general. More general studies of learning like
that by Kalantzis & Cope, (2008) note that
older models of education are not ‘replaced’
but incorporated and reworked under changing
circumstances. This chapter has argued that
we need to explore the behaviourist and sociocultural paradigms underpinning their activities
within the current formulation. Ultimately this
will circumscribe the kinds of creativity that
such curriculum and pedagogy make possible.
Equally, the benefits of creative learning are
clearly bound up with questions of quality.
There are examples of good and bad arts
learning, transformative and conservative ways
to make creative people, and probably
standardised ways of doing creative thinking!
From this perspective it might make as much
sense to think of creative learning as not so
much an absolute rupture from previous
incarnations but more in a comparative sense,
as a more creative learning. This would
acknowledge continuities with the past as well
as trying to set standards for the future.
Boden, M. A. (1995). Piaget (Modern Masters
S.) (2nd Edition). Fontana Press.
Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (2008). New
Learning: Elements of a Science of Education.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bolton, G. (2007). ‘A history of Drama
Education: a search for substance’. pp 45-62
in L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook of
Research in Arts Education. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer.
Lammy, D. (2008). Soft Skills Deliver Hard
Results. Speech delivered 29 April 2008 at
PwC, Embankment Place. Available online at
http://www.dius.gov.uk/speeches/lammy_softsk
ills_290408.html
Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Lloyd, R. D. (2006). Neo-bohemia: Art and
Commerce in the Postindustrial City. New
York: Routledge.
References
Carey, J. (2006). What Good Are the Arts?
London: Faber and Faber.
DEMOS. (2007). Ready for the Future? Young
People's Views on Work and Careers. London:
NESTA.
Egan, K. (1997). The Educated Mind: How
Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eisner, E. W. (2002). The Arts and the
Creation of Mind. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
NESTA. (2007). The hard sell for soft skills.
NESTA Press Release 26 April 2007.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-hard-sell-for-softskills/
Pope, R. (2005). Creativity: Theory, History,
Practice. Routledge.
QCA. (2007). Personal, Learning and Thinking
Skills Framework.
http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_13476.aspx
Accessed July 2008.
Facer, K. & Pykett, J. (2007). Developing and
Accrediting Personal Skills and Competencies:
Report and Ways Forward. Bristol: Futurelab.
QCA. (2008). A big picture of the curriculum: A
working draft April - June 2008.
http://www.qca.org.uk/libraryAssets/media/Big_
Picture_2008.pdf Accessed July 2008.
Fleming, M. (2008). Arts in Education and
Creativity: a review of the literature. London:
Creative Partnerships, Arts Council England.
Ross, A. (2003). No-Collar: the humane
workplace and its hidden costs. New York:
Basic Books.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life. Penguin Books Ltd.
Runco, M. A. (2007). Creativity: Theories and
Themes: Research, Development, and
Practice. London: Elsevier Academic Press.
Goldacre, B. (2006). ‘Brain gym exercises do
pupils no favours’ in The Guardian, Saturday
March 18 2006.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006
/mar/18/comment.badscience
Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., &
Sheridan, K. M. (2007). Studio Thinking: The
Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. New
York: Teachers’ College Press
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language
(Newly revised and edited by Alex Kozulin).
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society:
Development of Higher Psychological
Processes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Creative learning
25
policy
2
mixed messages
or permissions
and opportunities?
reflections on
current policy
perspectives on
creativity in
education
Pat Cochrane, Anna Craft and Graham Jeffery
This paper maps out policy developments to inform discussion of the
following:
• Can we define creative learning as distinct from other notions of
‘learning’
• If so, what might be the value of doing so?
• If agreed, whether any potentially useful models of ‘progression’
might be available and useful?
The emergence of creative
learning from a policy
perspective
Attempts in recent policy to define ‘creative
learning’ began with the publication of All Our
Futures, the 1999 report of the National
Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural
Education (NACCCE, 1999) which
recommended among many other priorities,
that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
(QCA) develop non-statutory guidance on
‘creative teaching and learning’. In laying the
ground for this work, NACCCE synthesised
much empirical evidence from researchers
such as Woods and Jeffrey (1996), Craft
(1997), and Harland et al (1998) who, during
the 1990s, had distinguished between creative
teaching and teaching for creativity. The key
findings from this work were that creative
learning involves innovation, control, relevance
and ownership - and that these are also
characteristics of creative teaching (Jeffrey &
Woods, 2003).
Exploration of many aspects of creativity and
how it might be promoted in pupils’ learning
was taken up from 2000 by the QCA (QCA,
2005). And from 2002, the notion of ‘creative
learning’ was given added momentum by the
establishment of Creative Partnerships –
28
Creative learning
another of NACCCE’s recommendations.
Creative Partnerships has promoted creative
learning as an agenda, seeking to foster
imaginative, inventive thinking and
engagement through active, meaningful
learning, across the curriculum; often involving,
but not always restricted to, the arts.
From the outset the elision of ‘creative’ and
‘cultural’ learning has led to some ambiguity in
policy documents which refer to creativity. A
common approach to creativity has been to
employ an argument that the processes and
procedures of arts education model kinds of
creative learning which could be applied
elsewhere in the curriculum. This concern to
promote the broad benefits of arts education is
often combined and occasionally
counterpoised with the rhetoric of the creative
and cultural industries, which includes the ‘arts
sector’ but is not limited to it. The justification
for creativity is often posed in terms of
developing skills needed for largely
technological ‘innovation’ and economic
competitiveness in a rapidly changing world
(e.g. Bentley and Seltzer, 1999, inter alia).
These perspectives have to sit alongside
concerns that the school curriculum should
engage with cultural heritage, identity and
citizenship. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising
that there has been some confusion of
interpretation and usage of the term ‘creative
learning’ in both policymaking and practice.
Understanding of what creative learning might
mean varies. The National College for School
Leadership (NCSL) held a seminar in 2002 to
explore its possible meanings and from this
emerged diverse perspectives, ranging from
those who saw creativity as freedom of
personal expression, to those who understood
it to reflect discipline, practice and craft, and as
progressively developed through learning
experiences (NCSL, 2003).
The importance of both imagination and
collaboration through enquiry focused on
change was increasingly reflected in the work
of Creative Partnerships from 2002 (Creative
Partnerships, 2008), and developing
partnerships between teachers and the visiting
‘creative professionals’ or artists has been seen
as a significant model for creative work
enabling young people to emulate collaborative
social practices often modelled on teamworking and shared problem-solving (Jeffery,
2005).
The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust
(SSAT) again places high value on imagination
combined with experience, emphasising that
creative learning thus conceived has the
potential to motivate pupils working both
individually and collaboratively (Hobbs, 2007).
The influential work by the QCA, Creativity:
Find it Promote it (2005) identified the
characteristics of creative thinking and
behaviour as involving, primarily:
• Questioning and challenging conventions
and assumptions
• Making inventive connections and
associating things that are not usually related
• Envisaging what might be: imagining –
seeing things in the mind’s eye
• Trying alternatives and fresh approaches,
keeping options open
• Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and
outcomes
The publication also suggests teacher
behaviours which support creativity. As we will
Creative learning
29
see, this approach is still informing ongoing
curriculum reform, although it was ‘creativity’
rather than ‘creative learning’ which was
explicitly a focus of the QCA endeavour.
The question of whether creative learning can
be distinct from other kinds of learning is not a
direct focus of any policy work, although
commentators, practitioners and researchers
have grappled with this question (e.g. Craft,
2005, Jeffrey, 2006, Cochrane and Cockett
2007). Such commentaries conclude that
creative learning attempts to bridge pedagogy
and learning, and seeks to recognise and
value the learner’s experience. It has been
called the ‘middle ground’ between creative
teaching and teaching for creativity (Jeffrey
and Craft, 2006).
The challenge of integrating
creative learning into policy
soundbites
Concern with how policy may be reported will
always tend to influence how policy is written
and presented: it may therefore be unrealistic
to expect the rather slippery concept of
‘creative learning’ to be explicitly articulated at
the top level of policy. Other nations of the UK
have also now made creativity a commitment
(Scottish Executive, 2006; Department of
Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills, Wales,
2006), as have nations further afield, including
Australia, Canada and Singapore. However,
after six years of the Creative Partnerships
initiative and the considerable head of steam
and enthusiasm for creative learning,
evidenced in the response to the House of
Commons Education Select Committee (2007)
there is only one specific reference to creativity
30
Creative learning
and none to creative learning in the Children’s
Plan (DCSF, 2007). Nevertheless, there is
plenty of evidence of policy commitment to
creativity in the detail of policy and in
implementation of the latest round of
educational reforms at a publication level
below that of statute.
Brave new territory?
The Roberts Review was set up in late 2005
under the auspices of Department of Culture,
Media and Sport (DCMS) and Department for
Education and Skills (DfES) and
commissioned jointly by James Purnell, then
Minister for the Creative Industries and Andrew
Adonis, Parliamentary Under Secretary of
State for Education and Skills. It was to be a
review of creative and cultural development of
young people and creativity in schools as well
as creativity as a set of skills to feed the
creative and cultural industries. This formed
part of an emerging narrative developing at the
DCMS about ‘Making Britain the World’s
Creative Hub’. (Purnell, 2005). The review was
briefed to assess progress since the 1999
NACCCE Report; not to make
recommendations but provide a ‘set of
assumptions’ upon which future policy in
relation to creativity could be based.
The report (Roberts, 2006) maps out a
framework for creativity starting with early
years, and considers extended schools,
building schools for the future, leading creative
learning including initial teacher education and
professional development, practitioner
partnerships, frameworks of regulations and
support and introduces the concept of an
individual creative portfolio. As well as
emphasising creativity as preparation for work
within the creative industries, the report made
the point that there is a wider, ‘moral’ case for
developing creativity as part of the
development of young people as citizens and
learners. The Government’s formal response
was positive but limited in its commitment.
However, the review’s influence has been
longer lasting.
The Cultural and Creative Education Board
(CCEAB) was set up in late 2006, to progress
the outcomes of the Roberts Report (2006).
Established, under the auspices of the DCMS,
the DfES (subsequently Department for
Children, Schools and Families - DCSF), QCA,
the Office for Standards in Education,
Children's Services and Skills (OfSTED), the
Training and Development Agency for Schools
(TDA), the National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and
Futurelab were all represented as well as a
Headteacher and a Director of Children’s
Services. Significant representation came from
the cultural and creative sector - UK Film
Council, The Museums, Libraries and Archives
Council (MLA), Arts Council England (ACE),
Cultural and Creative Skills (CCS) etc. but little
representation from the fields of engineering,
technology or science. This perhaps reinforced
a perception that the government’s
understanding of creativity was rooted in the
cultural and creative sector.
The increasing use of the term ‘cultural
learning’ rather than ‘creative learning’ by
agencies working to DCMS may also prove
significant. Given an apparent reluctance to
embrace a comprehensive definition of the
concept of creative learning it seems possible
that policy will drift towards ‘cultural learning’ –
perhaps a more tangible concept - so for
example when describing Creative
Partnerships, the McMaster Report,
Supporting Excellence in the Arts (2008)
describes it as a ‘cultural’ rather than ‘creative’
learning programme. That report,
commissioned by the Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport to consider “how the
system of public sector support for the arts can
encourage excellence, risk-taking and
innovation” (McMaster, 2008, p6), says nothing
about the relationship of the arts sector to
wider debates about the creative and cultural
industries. Its vision of ‘education’ appears
limited to ‘outreach and audience
development’, young people ‘experiencing’
culture rather than making it – a significant
omission which may risk a shift in policy
thinking about the arts towards a more
‘contained’ position. This particular DCMScommissioned report does not seem to make
connections between the cultural production,
learning, participation, regeneration and
community development in quite such explicit
ways as hitherto.
It seems likely therefore that the policy drivers
in relation to creativity across the whole school
curriculum may need to come from the
education sector and DCSF rather than
DCMS. The Creative Economy Strategy
Document, published by the Government in
February 2008, focuses strongly on creativity
as a set of skills to be developed in relation to
careers and progression into the creative and
cultural industries. Two clear narratives seem
to be emergent – the first of ‘nurturing talent’ to
enable young people to progress into careers
and further education in the arts, cultural and
creative industries; the second to do with
broader support for the notion of ‘cultural
Creative learning
31
learning’ enshrined in the pilot ‘cultural offer’ of
five hours a week in 10 areas around England
(Creative Partnerships, 2008).
Beyond these two commitments, creativity is
clearly identified as a strand within a range of
other government policies pertaining to formal
and informal learning, as follows.
Every Child Matters outcomes
The change of departmental name from DfES
to DCSF in line with the Every Child Matters
(ECM) agenda from July 2007 perhaps reflects
a shift to locate an agenda of educational
standards and attainment within the five Every
Child Matters outcomes: be healthy, stay safe,
enjoy and achieve, make a positive
contribution and achieve economic well-being 6.
Although there is no explicit reference to
creativity in the ECM outcomes, they seem to
enshrine a concept of childhood in which
children and young people have the
opportunity to play and have an active role in
shaping their lives. Such values may open up
ways of broadening the conception of
educational achievement, not simply valuing
the achievements of young people mainly in
terms of qualifications and assessment
outcomes.
Early years
Early years education has seen considerable
change, with integration of provision for
children aged 0-5 in the new Foundation Stage
to be implemented in all early years settings
from September 2008. Education and care in
the early years have been integrated with
6 See http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/
32
Creative learning
health and welfare under the umbrella of
integrated children’s centres. Within the
curriculum, creative development forms one of
six areas of learning and development. The
roles of those working in early years education
are being professionalised, with the
introduction of the Early Years Professional
(EYP) qualified to level 6 with one EYPS
practitioner in every children’s centre by 2010
and the announcement of a Graduate Leader
Fund in December, 2007, to ensure a
graduate leader in every full day-care setting
(two in the most disadvantaged areas) by
2015 (DCSF, 2007; DCSF 2008). The
demands on practice include capability in
fostering children’s creativity, requiring greater
professional imagination.
Learning Outside the Classroom
Manifesto
Launched by the DFES in 2006, the Manifesto
affirms principles of both creative and cultural
learning. It refers to the need to make links
between feelings and learning, to enable
children to develop a deeper understanding of
concepts that span traditional subject
boundaries and to respond to children’s
curiosity and nurture creativity (DfES, 2006).
Primary curriculum
The Rose review of the Primary Curriculum,
currently under way at the time of writing
(Spring, 2008), was instructed by the
Secretary of State, in January 2008, to ensure
that the new Primary Curriculum encourages
creativity and inspires a lifelong commitment to
learning.
Secondary curriculum
The reformed secondary curriculum, to be
introduced in schools from September 2008 is
a significant opportunity to transform the
experience and opportunities for learners in
secondary schools. The curriculum includes
‘Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills’ (PLTS)
which cut across the curriculum. Alongside
functional skills in English, mathematics and
ICT, the PLTS framework comprises six
groups of skills, each with a subset of skills,
behaviours and personal qualities:
1 Independent enquirers
2 Creative thinkers
3 Reflective learners
4 Team workers
5 Self managers
6 Effective participators
In addition the curriculum comprises non
statutory ‘cross-curriculum dimensions’ which
schools are encouraged to utilise when
designing their curriculum. These again refer
to ‘creativity and critical thinking’.
Although there is a possibility that the ‘creative
thinker’ could be translated into a set of
formulaic creative thinking techniques, the
framework gives schools permission to design
teaching and learning processes placing
creative learning at the centre of their
curriculum. A QCA-commissioned mapping
exercise (Facer and Pykett, 2007) emphasizes
interrelationships between assessment,
curriculum, pedagogy and school cultures.
Creative and Media Diplomas
and 14 – 19 reform
The new creative and media diploma has a
focus on vocational skills for work in the
creative and cultural industries and
‘encourages students to think and work
creatively, giving students the practical skills to
bring their ideas to life. A focus on Creative
Business and Enterprise places creative work
within a business context and teaches
students the skills to succeed at work’ (DCSF
2008). The extent to which creative learning
will form part of the core specification for
Diplomas in other areas is not entirely clear,
although indications are broadly positive, given
that they all place emphasis on a blend of
academic and practical skills, theoretical and
applied learning, suggesting that supporting
‘active learning’ and student agency as a
component of creativity are likely to become
more important.
Innovation, networked learning
communities and practitioner
research and development
Another potential driver for an increased
emphasis on creative learning is the
Government’s commitment to develop a set of
national strategies to support innovation,
signalled by the establishment of the
Department for Innovation, Universities and
Skills (DIUS).
In early 2007 NESTA published a policy
briefing calling for a greater emphasis on
creativity within teaching, learning and
curriculum as one of the building blocks of
enabling a more innovative society and
Creative learning
33
economy, and highlighted four areas of action
where policymakers could make a difference
(NESTA, 2007):
• enabling peer to peer learning between
schools,
• embedding ‘soft skills’ (i.e. interpersonal
skills, collaborative skills) across the
curriculum,
• making ‘subtle’ changes to assessment and
the professional development of teachers,
and
• considering how existing initiatives fit into a
wider drive for education for innovation.
Numerous initiatives address the first three
points of the 2007 NESTA agenda, led by the
SSAT, for example, through networks of
specialist schools and practitioner-led CPD
initiatives. TDA, the NCSL and the General
Teaching Council for England also support a
number of initiatives which are intended to
enable schools to share practice and
undertake peer-to-peer learning. Others are
led by the Innovation Unit through their ‘Next
Practice’ programme, and many other locallyled initiatives are independently funded
through a mix of local authority, arts,
regeneration, and private sources.
The networked learning communities and
leadership programmes led by NCSL and, in
the Further Education (FE) sector, the Centre
for Excellence in Leadership (CEL) have
emphasised professional learning, practitioner
action research, peer mentoring in workforce
development and building capacity for wider
innovation. Many universities are strongly
engaged with regional consortia addressing
issues of progression, professional
development and capacity for creative learning
across all sectors of employment, including
34
Creative learning
education and the cultural industries, for
example through the ‘Creative Way’
consortium of universities and FE colleges in
the Thames Gateway (see
http://www.creativeway.org.uk/).
The Innovation White Paper, Innovation
Nation, published by DIUS in March 2008
(DIUS, 2008) makes some reference to the
relationships between creativity – the capacity
for the creation of new knowledge and novel
solutions - and different forms of social and
business innovation, although much of the
language of the document is couched in terms
of basic ‘skills’, ‘talent’ and knowledge transfer
rather than a broader conception of creativity
as a life-wide skill. There is a latent opportunity
here for creative learning to become much
more prominent in policy thinking if DCMS,
DIUS and DCSF can agree an agenda,
although there may also be considerable risks
if a narrowly functional economically-driven
approach is allowed to dominate. Nor is it yet
clear, beyond pilot projects, small scale
initiatives and experimental programmes, how
the Innovation Nation agenda is to be
practically supported within the 5 – 18
education policy more generally, given that
standards-based instruction and a strong
emphasis on competitive testing regimes still
remain the dominant approach within schools
policy (Craft & Jeffrey, 2008).
The Children’s Plan
The impetus behind the Children’s Plan (2007)
is to raise standards and narrow the gap
between those who are underachieving and
those who attain 5 GCSE A-C grades; coupled
with a wider intent to ‘intervene early’ in the life
courses of those young people who might
appear to be ‘at risk’ of social exclusion. One
possible interpretation of the plan is that
schooling should be focused on cognitive
learning, with social and emotional awareness
acting as an underpinning set of skills to
support attainment, and that although play and
experimentation are appropriate in the early
years such activities should remain outside the
main school day in extended school, out of
school hours activities and beyond the school
gates in improved play spaces and youth
provision. The plan refers explicitly to creativity
only once - in the context of preparation for
employment in the creative industries.
Young people also need to develop the
ability to think and act creatively and be
innovative. As the Roberts Review
Nurturing Creativity in Young People noted,
creativity will be key to young people
achieving economic well being in adult life
because of the increasing importance of the
creative economies. (DCMS & DfES, 2006,
p.73)
The discourse at the core of the NACCCE
report (1999) suggesting creativity is an
essential capacity for preparation for the
complexities and challenges of 21st century
living, the pace of change and a range of
employment beyond the creative industries per
se does not appear in the Children’s Plan.
Instead it is replaced by a functional view of
creativity largely as preparation for
employment in the creative industries.
The two clear strands emerging in relation to
culture and creativity are:
• supporting the development of creativity as
a route into the creative industries, and
• a cultural offer as a way of stimulating
children and young people and stimulating
new ‘talent’.
The Children’s Plan places great emphasis on
personalised learning, an agenda which has
considerable potential to support the
development of creativity, given that it
emphasises the individual needs, skills and
talents of young people. However, although
placed within a context of tailoring the
curriculum for ‘individual needs’, increasing
choice and moving away from the content
dominated curriculum of the past, the Plan
describes personalisation largely in terms of
assessment and tracking progression rather
than pedagogy. The emphasis therefore is on
“personal targets, rapid intervention to keep
pupils on trajectory and vigorous assessment
to check and maintain progress.“ (DCSF,
2007, p64).
The Education and Skills Select
Committee report and the
Government’s response
The House of Commons Education and Skills
Committee (2007), reporting on its enquiry
entitled Creative Partnerships and the
Curriculum, was robust in its affirmation that
creativity was a set of skills which applied
across the curriculum.
Most now appear agreed on a definition of
creativity which goes beyond the expressive
and aesthetic arts, and agree that in
educational terms creativity should extend
right across the curriculum (House of
Commons Education and Skills Committee,
2007, paragraph 17, page 14)
Creative learning
35
It also identified the “urgent” need to prioritise
“developing new methods of assessing
incremental progress” stating that “existing
measures of progress which focus on the
attainment of Key Stages, are unlikely to
capture small but steady improvements, or
progress in areas such as self- confidence,
and team- working, and risk-taking” (ibid,
paragraph 28, page 17).
The Select Committee also questions “whether
the current make-up of the Creative
Partnerships board adequately reflects the full
range of professions to which creativity is key.’
(ibid, paragraph 18, page 14).
The Government response to this report
recognised that “creativity is not just about the
arts …it applies across all subjects.” (House of
Commons Children, Schools and Families
Committee, 2008, Appendix 1, page 1). It also
stated that “while there will always be scope
for collaboration with other sectors, both
Departments consider that Creative
Partnerships’ principal focus should remain on
arts and culture.” (ibid, page 3). Following the
publication of their response the formation of a
new Youth Culture Trust led by Creative
Partnerships was announced (DCMS, 2008).
Current policy statements refer to creativity
rather than creative learning, perhaps
reflecting difficulties of definition discussed
earlier. It is not clear in policy terms what the
distinctive value of creative learning as distinct
from creativity might be, although external to
policy many studies indicate that creative
learning brings many benefits both in its own
right and in the context of creative partnership
(Craft, Cremin and Burnard, 2008; Fiske, ed.
1999; Griffiths & Woolf, 2004; NFER, 2006;
OfSTED, 2003; 2006).
36
Creative learning
Opportunities or challenges?
A number of questions in relation to creativity
emerge from current policy statements, posing
both opportunities and challenges. As this brief
paper sets out, the policy landscape is
crowded with agencies, initiatives,
programmes and targets. Given this
complexity and occasional confusion, we pose
some questions for further consideration by
policymakers and practitioners:
• How far can the new Early Years
Foundation Stage framework support
practitioners in implementing an approach
to fostering creativity in children across the
curriculum?
• To what extent do the ‘personal learning
and thinking skills’ built in to the Key Stage
3 (KS3) school curriculum for 11-14 year
olds from September 2008, offer
opportunity for fostering creativity – both in
terms of ‘creative thinkers’ and in terms of
the cluster of skills as a whole, in the
development of curriculum, learning,
assessment and pedagogy so as to nurture
pupil agency and engagement?
• Does the emphasis on personal learning
and thinking skills and social and emotional
behaviour in the new KS3 curriculum
adequately encompass all aspects of
creativity?
• Does the term ‘creativity and critical thinking
skills’ implicitly limit creativity to a cognitive
and logical skill disconnected from any
emotional or spiritual reaction and exclude
intuition, or spontaneous non-linear
behaviour?
• Is it possible to frame creativity within the
approach to target setting and assessment
outlined in the Children’s Plan? Or are
further adjustments necessary?
• Is ‘developing individual talent’ being used
as a replacement term for creativity? If so,
does this adequately take account of
creativity as both solitary and also a social
and collaborative process?
• What are the implications for creative
learning given the emphasis in the
Children’s Plan on schools reporting
regularly to parents on pupil progress
• Should OfSTED require schools to monitor
and report their approaches to developing
creativity? If so, how does this begin to
open up how we might talk about
‘progression’ in creative learning?
• Does the phrase used in the Children’s
Plan transition from mainly play based
learning to largely cognitive development
demonstrate a misplaced polarisation of
cognitive development between play and
logical-mathematical thinking?
• How can different strands of Government’s
stated ambition to create a more innovative
and personalised education system be
translated into practical, system-wide
support for practitioners to develop
innovative practice and more creative
models of teaching and learning?
Creative learning
37
Bentley, T. & Seltzer, K. (1999). The Creative
Age. London: DEMOS.
DCMS and DCSF (2008). Young people to get
five hours of culture a week - £135m funding
boost announced. Joint DCMS/DCSF Press
Release 009/08. 13 February 2008.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/me
dia_releases/2150.aspx
Cochrane, P. and Cockett, M. (2007). Building
a creative school: a dynamic approach to
school development. Stoke-on- Trent:
Trentham Books.
DCMS, BERR (Department for Business,
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) & DIUS
(2008). Creative Britain: New talents for the
new economy. London: HMSO.
Craft, A. (1997). Can you teach creativity?
Nottingham: Education Now.
Department for Education, Lifelong Learning
and Skills (Wales) (2008). Common
Requirements across the National Curriculum
– Creativity Skills. Retrieved 15 January 2008
from:
http://old.accac.org.uk/uploads/documents/135
9.doc
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Craft, A., Cremin, T., Burnard, P. (Eds.) (2008).
Creative Learning 3-11 and How we Document
It. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
Craft, A. & Jeffrey, B. (2008). ‘Creativity and
performativity in teaching and learning:
tensions, dilemmas, constraints,
accommodations and synthesis.’ British
Educational Research Journal Vol. 34 (5): 577584
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http://www.creative-partnerships.com/ (last
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Early Years Foundation Stage: Setting the
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Children. DCSF Press Release 2007/0235. 11
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d=2007_0235
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response to Nurturing Creativity and Young
People. London: HMSO.
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DfES. (2006). Learning Outside the Classroom
Manifesto. London: DfES
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Griffiths, M. & Woolf, F. (2004). Report on
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I. (1998). The Effects and Effectiveness of Arts
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Creative learning
39
art practice
3
artists’
perspectives on
art practice and
pedagogy
Emily Pringle
‘To put the artist at the centre of the art education programme is to
place a particular subject and a particular type and quality of
discourse at its centre. This discourse is characterised by rigorous
doubt which must, in the face of all forms of authority, be directed,
pointed, shaped, not just by the student…. But also by the teacher.’
(Thompson, 1994:46).
This quotation, from the then Head of Fine Art
at Goldsmith’s College, University of London
suggests that artists working in educational
scenarios contribute something specific. This
is characterised here as a combination of
discipline and uncertainty. In the context of
debates around creative learning a degree of
‘rigorous doubt’ seems appropriate, partly to
consider whether this facet of artistic practice
can facilitate active and reflective forms of
meaning making, but also because the term
‘creative learning’ itself is open to multiple
interpretations.
Creative Partnerships’ discourse locates
creative practitioners as particularly adept at
stimulating creative learning. Such
professionals, by being creative themselves,
are potentially able to develop creative
learning skills in others (Collard, 2007). This
paper examines to what extent the connection
between art practice and creative pedagogy
exists. It considers how visual artists working
in educational contexts perceive art practice
and artist-led teaching and learning. It explores
the different roles artist educators occupy and
attempts to connect one understanding of art
practice with the learning process. This
analysis provides a basis from which to identify
why artist educators can facilitate creative
learning, but also where potential tensions
may arise.
42
Creative learning
The paper draws on two studies (Pringle,
2002; Pringle, 2008). Both examined visual
artists’ perceptions of their artistic and
pedagogic practice. Arts education and visual
art are highly complex and varied and this
research focused on a small number of
practitioners. Whilst recognising the value of
the wide range of artists’ interventions in
education, (such as the long-standing tradition
of theatre in education), this research
examined visual art practice exclusively.
Nonetheless, the case studies provide
valuable insights since they involve visual art
practitioners with considerable experience of
working in education scenarios. In this way, I
suggest the research can contribute to a
greater understanding of artist-led pedagogy
by interrogating artists’ perceptions in detail.
Background to the practice: the
legacy of community arts
The practice of artists working in learning
environments, especially schools, and
community contexts is long established.
Antecedents can be traced to those artists
working in the community as part of the ‘New
Deal’ in America in the 1930s (Meecham &
Sheldon, 2004). In the 1970s and 80s the
community arts movement in Britain embraced
a range of artists and activities. It took as its
starting point the notion of empowerment
through participation in a creative process, a
dislike of cultural hierarchies and a belief in the
creative potential of all sections of society
(Morgan, 1995). Within this ‘democratic’
creative framework (Banaji et al, 2006),
community arts constructed people as active
meaning makers and potential participants in a
creative process.
The legacy of community arts is evident in
recent more ‘socially engaged’ art practice
(Butler & Reiss, 2007) and in the current
practice of artists working in, for example,
gallery education contexts (Taylor, 2006).
Although Creative Partnerships has sought to
distance itself from previous arts education
interventions, arguably the initiative shares
certain common concerns with community
arts. The latter’s emphasis on individuals as
active makers of meaning is relevant to
creative learning debates. Equally, community
arts promoted a model of participatory art
practice, wherein creativity is developed and
meaning emerges through the collaborative
processes of facilitated dialogue and making
activities - processes evident within Creative
Partnerships and other arts education
initiatives (Harding, 2005). A further reason for
re-visiting community arts practice emerges
from certain artist educators’ own
constructions of their creative practice and
how they rationalise and explain their own
forms of pedagogic engagement.
Artists’ construction of creative
practice and artistic expertise
My research examined how selected visual art
practitioners defined themselves as ‘artists’ in
terms of the knowledge and skills they
perceive they possess. Significantly the case
study artists did not describe their practice in
terms of making images, or were wedded to a
particular medium or technique, but rather as a
process of conceptual enquiry and meaning
making. Drawing on their own experiences,
these artists engaged in creative investigation
and problem solving, which culminated in the
manifestation of their conceptual
Creative learning
43
preoccupation: the artwork. Thus, whilst they
may have been proficient at welding or digital
photography, they utilised these skills in order
to articulate their specific ideas and did not
define themselves as sculptors or
photographers exclusively.
art making is necessarily uncertain and fluid.
These artists perceived they were skilled in
accommodating the unexpected; they valued
curiosity, imaginative responses, openmindedness and the freedom to explore
concurrent strands of interest.
Consequently the knowledge and skills they
considered essential to the artist are those that
enabled them to negotiate the process of
enquiry. This expertise has been described as
‘aesthetic intelligence... [which is] about
judgements and …a form of intelligence that
can know what to do when making’ (Grizelda
Pollock interviewed in Raney, 2003:149).
Artists’ knowledge enables them to act
effectively to realise their ideas and resembles
what has been defined elsewhere, as
‘practitioner’ knowledge (Eraut, 1994) or ‘know
how’. As such it is experiential (it is gained and
revealed through practice) and complex. In
some cases (the ‘feel’ of a piece of sculpture,
for example) it is embodied and resists
systematic and explicit organisation. Such
practical knowledge can be differentiated from
more theoretical knowledge or ‘know what’,
which is capable of written codification and
generalisation. Whereas an academic, for
example, commonly demonstrates their
knowledge through erudition, an artist reveals
theirs through engaging in the art making
process and effectively articulating their ideas.
Spontaneity and intuition were important, but
looking, reflecting and critical thinking were
equally significant skills. Art making was
considered purposeful and, contrary to the
model of the Romantic creative genius, was not
fuelled exclusively by inspiration: these artists
saw that artistic meaning making involves
production, but also evaluation and
rationalisation, so that ideas were realised
coherently as pieces of work. Artists’ expertise
therefore involved judging how to balance
‘poetic play’ (Pollock interviewed in Raney,
2002) with formal decision making and critical
reassessment. Prentice describes this process
as ‘analogous to a conversational exchange’
(Prentice, 2000:148), which allows for
experimentation, but also tolerates failure.
The case study artists’ constructions of the
artistic process revealed the skills they
considered intrinsic to their expertise. Active
questioning and enquiry underpinned the
creative process and art making was seen to
involve moments of inspiration alongside
rationality. Playfulness, risk taking and
productive failure were considered central, as
44
Creative learning
Art practice was thus constructed as an
experiential process of conceptual enquiry that
embraced inspiration, critical thinking and the
building of meanings. What emerged through
the research was how these artists saw art
practice providing a model for a creative
learning process wherein learners drew on
their experience to gain understanding, develop
new knowledge and articulate their ideas.
How do artists engage with
learners?
In terms of direct pedagogic engagement, the
research found that artists draw on their own
experience as creative practitioners to instigate
a particular type of learning process which
resembles their art practice. This has
implications in terms of creative learning both
because of what the artists’ perceive they are
‘teaching’, but also how they engage with
learners.
In line with ‘constructivist’ learning models, the
artists adopted a more facilitative stance,
engaging students in the processes of learning,
sparking their curiosity, improving the quality of
their thinking and increasing their disposition to
learn (Watkins, 2003). These creative
practitioners prioritized the development of
learners’ ideas and individual creativity, whilst
encouraging them to reflect on their activities.
The teaching of specific techniques or craft
skills was perceived as important, but
necessary mainly to enable participants to
realise their ideas more effectively in visual
form. The artists encouraged learners to
question and embark on a process of enquiry,
with some of the artists actually describing their
pedagogic practice as resembling a
participatory research process.
Echoing the concerns of the community arts
movement, these artists located learners as
active makers of meaning rather than as
passive recipients of disembodied knowledge.
The artists considered that they have a
responsibility to enable learners to articulate
issues and concerns that have significance or
relevance to individuals in creative and
innovative ways. They sought to give
participants 'a voice' and to encourage their
broader critical and reflective thinking.
The artists also promoted experiential learning,
with an emphasis on giving participants the
opportunity to experiment, take risks and play,
within a supportive environment. An example
is provided by the artist Esther Sayers, who
describes working with a group of deaf
students who were interested in making films:
They had never used video before and
certainly the four year old was just amazed
with the idea that we were just giving her
the video. The learning how to hold it so
she didn’t drop it was as much an important
part of the process as turning on the
camera and filming something. It was about
the opportunity to get confidence, using it
more freely rather than in a structured
school-type setting. I think that was better
than just standing up and saying this is how
you turn it on, we did almost the opposite of
that. We just gave them the cameras and
let them figure it out for themselves. (Esther
Sayers quoted in Pringle, 2002).
The emphasis was on enabling learners to
take responsibility for, and actively participate
in, their own learning as much as mastering
how to use a camera.
As in Esther’s quotation above, whilst
describing their practice these artists tended to
define themselves in opposition to teachers or
to conventional school scenarios. They
resisted describing their practice as ‘teaching’,
associating that term exclusively with a
restricted notion of transmissive pedagogy.
Although respecting the teaching profession,
the constraints of the curriculum and the need
to transmit a specific body of knowledge, such
values were seen by the artists as counter to
their mode of pedagogy. Instead artists sought
to engage participants primarily through
discussion exchanging ideas and experiences.
Creative learning
45
There was evidence of 'co-constructive'
(Watkins, 2003) learning taking place, whereby
shared knowledge is generated between all
participants including the teacher. In line with
the co-construction learning model these
artists’ identified themselves as co-learners,
who question and re-organise their knowledge,
rather than as infallible experts transmitting
information.
There is some evidence that the attributes of
effective learners (for example being active and
strategic, skilled in developing goals, reflecting
on and understanding their own learning:
Watkins et al, 1996) are shared by art
practitioners. This suggests why artists resist
describing themselves as ‘teachers’ and
approach their pedagogic work more from the
perspective of the learner who is keen to make
meaning. Positioning themselves as the didact
who imposes or transmits is counter to their
experience as artists. Therefore, although their
resistance to seeing their practice in terms of
more transmissive modes of teaching reveals
itself in opposition to teachers, it can be seen
to stem more from their allegiance to an
experiential and creative process of meaningmaking.
By exemplifying the attributes of a creative
learner the artist can act as a mentor or role
model to those working with them. This works
most effectively when they exhibit a profound
level of engagement with their practice and
demonstrate their particular working methods
and critical and creative approaches. The
pedagogic model of apprenticeship is relevant
here – where the artist or teacher is perceived
as a ‘master practitioner’ who embodies their
practice and reveals their know how through
their actions (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The
46
Creative learning
following quotation from artist Liz Ellis
illustrates this:
I tried to be very overt about the way I
made work so we got sketchbooks and I
kept my sketchbook alongside theirs and I
showed them what I thought was working
and what wasn’t working. I showed them
ideas I’d had in between or when I’d got
stuck, so I tried to be very concrete about
what I was doing. (Liz Ellis quoted in
Pringle, 2002)
As an educator Liz is not to ‘teach’ drawing
skills, for example: rather she is sharing her
artistic knowledge and enabling learners to
participate alongside her. Through witnessing
the artist engaging in her sketchbook activity
as well as having the opportunity to maintain
their own versions, learners gain
understanding through experience. Arguably,
by making her artistic process explicit, this
artist is demonstrating her own creative
learning journey. The pedagogic relationship
between artist and learners revealed in this
example has implications for how teacher and
learner relationships can be constructed in
creative learning scenarios more broadly, but
also for how creative learning can be
assessed.
What are the implications for
‘creative learning’?
Evidence from this research indicated that
artists’ perceptions of their practice and
pedagogy correlated in many ways with
creative learning and teaching strategies. In
his examination of creativity and early
childhood education, for example, Roy
Prentice identifies specific criteria for creativity
(including inventiveness, flexibility, imagination,
risk taking and a tolerance of ambiguity). He
identifies creative learners as active meaningmakers and argues that creativity flourishes
where the ‘co-existence of alternatives’ and
‘the value of individual interpretation’ are
encouraged (Prentice, 2000: 155). He places a
premium on experiential learning and
concludes that the foremost skills required for
creativity are enquiry, reflection and criticism.
Although not describing their activities explicitly
in the language of creative learning, the case
study artists exhibited these characteristics
outlined by Prentice. The constructions of their
pedagogic practice also included many of the
criteria for creative learning that he advocated.
In terms of what they were seeking to facilitate
(the development of participants’ ideas and
their critical and reflective skills), their mode of
engagement (experiential, experimental and
participatory,) and their positioning of learners
as active and self-determining, their practice
chimes well with the discourses of creativity
promulgated by Creative Partnerships in
general. As creative makers of meaning
themselves it would appear that artists are well
equipped to facilitate creative learning in
others.
Yet consideration must be given to how and
whether artist-led pedagogy can engender
broader and longer-term creative learning
strategies across a school. One issue
associated with artists’ interventions in
education (which these artists are aware of) is
that art practitioners can adopt creative and
experimental pedagogic modes because
generally they are free from curriculum
constraints, whereas teachers are not always
at liberty to do so. The artist thus becomes the
creative ‘other’, whereas the teacher (who
frequently in the case of secondary schools is
an art practitioner in their own right) can be
cast in a stereotyped role of didact or
classroom police. There is a danger that artists
‘reinforce normative relations because they act
as a one off bubble where they are perceived
as limited outsider interventions’ (Addison &
Burgess, 2006: 92). Creative Partnerships has
sought to overcome this issue by supporting
artists to work in partnership with schools over
the longer term. However, the dominance of
the transmission learning model in schools,
coupled with the current culture of assessment
suggests that teachers will need considerable
support and professional development
opportunities to adopt more co-constructive,
open–ended and participatory modes of
working, with or without artists’ interventions.
The case study artists were also conscious of
the limits of what they could achieve in terms
of changing broader learning agendas particularly as they were only involved with
participants for relatively short periods of time.
Therefore, whilst these artists differentiated
themselves from teachers, they acknowledged
that projects were more successful and
sustainable when they worked alongside staff,
particularly in school contexts which promoted
more collaborative, less constrained modes of
teaching.
A further issue concerns the form of
engagement visual artists typically adopted
with participants. The case study artists
favoured working intensively with smaller
groups over a longer period, which allowed for
individual enquiry, dialogic exchange and
incremental learning through direct experience.
Creative learning
47
The practitioners valued working alongside
learners, establishing trust and sharing
knowledge; a scenario that is more difficult to
establish if there are large numbers of
participants involved, or the intervention is short
term. Within most education initiatives involving
artists (Creative Partnerships included) there is
pressure to include more participants rather
than less, which can result in superficial or
briefer engagements between artist and
learners. In such cases it is less clear how the
pedagogic exchange favoured by artists can be
sustained.
Finally questions arise over how a creative
learning process can be maintained if there is
an emphasis within an artist-led project on
particular and more restricted outcomes. Are
artists in a school to engage participants in a
process of creative learning specifically or to
teach them certain craft skills? Or, as is
frequently the case with visual artists, have
they been employed to address an identified
issue (raising awareness of bullying, helping
improve the physical infrastructure of the
school or addressing one area of the science
curriculum, for example)? In some cases those
involved (including the artist) may seek a ‘high
quality’ product. Achieving this outcome can
require participants to shift away from
experimental and collaborative processes to
focus more on the finished artwork. In several
cases these artists acknowledged that they
took complete control of a project near to
completion to ensure it reached the standards
they, or the commissioners, desired. Whilst
having a clear purpose is a key element of any
creative process, in such cases skill is required
to ensure that the participatory structure does
not break down and learners become
disenfranchised from their own creative
learning trajectory.
48
Creative learning
Implications for the assessment
of creative learning
Considerations of art practice and creative
learning suggest that attention must be given
to the process of meaning making. In the
same way that these artists frame their
practice as an experiential and conceptual
process, creative learning can be constructed,
not as knowledge acquisition, but in terms of
the ways people learn. Appropriate
assessment should, it seems to me, embrace
learning competencies and how such
competencies are manifest in practice.
Furthermore notions of progression can be
linked to how these competencies are
developed and are made explicit. For
example, progression will note how learners
take more risks, reflect more deeply and
coherently on their actions and their failures,
take greater control over their learning, feel
more comfortable experimenting and are more
able to articulate their ideas.
Evaluating how these competencies have
developed furthers understanding of the
creative learning process. However, it is
equally important to foreground and reveal
who is doing the assessment and for what
purposes. In order to sustain a feasible
creative environment learners need to retain
responsibility and ownership as far as
possible. Ideally young people, for example,
engage in assessing their own progress. In
line with the principles of arts practice
described above, learners should be aware of
what they are being assessed on (what criteria
are being applied) and why. For an arts
practitioner such as Roz Hall ‘process
generated evaluation’ which ‘acknowledges
the subjective nature of ‘quality’ and extent to
which notions of quality are transient’ is crucial
(2005). She argues that:
It is important to recognise the extent to
which a notion of quality, as a fixed and
naturalised element of educational
discourse, is aligned with a very specific set
of social and cultural understandings and
experiences… the contemporary
significance of ever more unique, and
distinct fusions of diverse and specific
cultural and social experiences can be
understood as challenging any notions of
quality as being, in any way, ultimately fixed
(Hall, 2005: 11).
illuminates how and why these practitioners’
art practice and approaches to teaching and
learning can develop learners’ intellectual and
intuitive modes of enquiry, whilst bolstering
their critical and reflective skills. However,
tensions arise between this kind of artist-led
teaching and the expectations and procedures
of certain types of school context. For artspractice to enhance ongoing work within the
institution effectively and for assessment of
creative learning to recognise the complex,
dynamic and fluid nature of the process will
require a deeper kind of structural change if
we want to make creative learning a persistent
feature of everyday education.
Assessments of creative learning, as Hall
identifies, therefore need to take account not
only of what is being evaluated, but also how
that evaluative process constructs the learner
and values the outputs of the learning process.
Within a creative learning scenario the
dynamic and collaborative relationship
between teacher (and/or artist) and learner
accommodates a flexible and negotiated
assessment process, where the learning of all
participants is recognised. Despite support for
such procedures being given by the
Department for Culture Media and Sport in
their sanctioning of the concept of ‘creative
portfolios’ (DCMS/DCSF, 2006), the extent to
which ongoing, participatory and self-regulated
forms of assessment are possible within
current school cultures is questionable.
Conclusion
It is generally accepted that artists can play a
vital role in facilitating creative learning. The
research into specific visual artists’ perceptions
Creative learning
49
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Creative learning
studio
4
studio thinking:
a model of
artistic mind
Lois Hetland
What is the Studio Thinking Framework?
The Studio Thinking Framework (Hetland et al, 2007) describes two
aspects of art classrooms: (1) three ‘studio structures’ that art
teachers use to organize time and interactions and (2) eight ‘studio
habits of mind’ – dispositions (that is, skills and attitudes about their
uses; Perkins, Jay, & Tishman, 1993) that are taught through studio
art classes.
Studio Structures is the term we use to
describe three basic patterns of time, space,
and interactions that teachers employ in studio
classrooms. They describe the many complex
activities that occur in arts classrooms.
‘Demonstration-Lectures’ are offered through
visual demonstrations and images
supplemented by verbal explanations to
quickly convey to students the challenges,
processes, information, and ideas that
students will need immediately in the work to
follow.
Students-at-Work sessions, which
make up the bulk of classroom time, are when
students make artworks and teachers observe
and offer personalized responses to advance
students’ thinking, efforts, and works.
Critiques are periodic descriptive
conversations among students and teachers
about students’ in-progress and finished
works, which are displayed informally and
temporarily. Critiques can be conducted oneon-one or in small- or whole-groups; they can
be verbal, silent, or written; they can involve
comments by the student artist, peers,
teachers, and/or outside experts; and they are
organized in many ways.
We also defined Studio Transitions,
when students move from one structure to
another or prepare to start or end art class, as
52
Creative learning
a management rather than a learning
structure, to remind teachers to handle them
carefully so that they do not eat up valuable
learning time.
We used the term Studio Habits of
Mind to describe eight important kinds of
general cognitive and attitudinal dispositions
that are taught in serious visual arts classes.
These are:
1 Develop Craft: Technique and Studio
Practice;
2 Engage & Persist;
3 Envision;
It is easy to hypothesize a relationship
between the Studio Habits of Mind and
creativity. Both are dispositional – that is, each
Studio Habit is comprised of skills, inclinations,
and alertness to opportunities (Perkins, Jay, &
Tishman, 1993); creativity seems similarly
dispositional. While the arts are not the only
creative domain, they decidedly are creative
arenas – like creativity, arts tie subjects
together interpretively (Efland, 2004; Perkins,
1994), aim to create adaptive novelty (Perkins,
1983), and are structured so that individuals
interact within a field and domain
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
4 Express;
5 Observe;
6 Reflect: Question & Explain and Evaluate;
7 Stretch & Explore; and
8 Understand Art World: Domain and
Communities.
We saw teachers working to instil all eight
Studio Habits of Mind; and all the teaching and
learning we observed during the research on
this project was classified into one or more of
these dispositions. Our observations
suggested that these habits ‘stack’ during
instruction and art-making, often operating in
clusters related to the understanding teachers
intend students to develop through the
challenge or problem to be pursued. For
example, in a class focused on creating a ‘unit’
that is repeated to create a sculpture, the
emphasized habits were stretch & explore,
engage & persist, observe, and envision. In a
puppet-making project, the emphasis focused
on the cluster of develop craft, envision, and
express.
Why we developed the Studio
Thinking Framework
The Studio Thinking research was motivated
by two related interests. First, the status of the
arts in education increasingly relies on clear
descriptions of what arts teach and how arts
learning might credibly be assessed. Second,
findings from our previous review of transfer
from arts to non-arts learning and cognition
(Winner & Hetland, 2000; 2001) concluded
that many of the advocacy claims about
transfer were not supported by the data – they
could not be generalized from studies that
were accumulated and analysed. We realized
that rigorous tests for transfer required first that
the field understand what arts teach, what arts
students learn, and how that could be
measured. Both perspectives compelled us to
pursue a rigorous, empirically-based
description of teaching and learning in the arts.
Our goal was to understand the kinds of
thinking that teachers help students to develop
in visual arts classes and the supports they
use to do that. We also wished to provide
Creative learning
53
strong evidence that the real curriculum in the
visual arts extends far beyond the teaching of
technique and that such teaching engenders
the development of serious thinking
dispositions that are valued both within and
beyond the arts: possibly what this publication
envisages as creative learning.
We conducted our study at the high school
level (age 14-18). We realized that we were
entering a complex disciplinary landscape, and
we aimed to find a language to help teachers
and researchers describe it. We were not
looking for a prescription that dictated what
should be done and what is best. Rather, we
wanted to map visual arts teaching in ways
that would allow teachers and researchers to
see that territory more clearly, to convey more
easily what they knew about classrooms and
teaching, to ponder alternate routes that might
be taken, and to learn more readily from other
experienced travellers.
What such an approach might
achieve
Since its creation, Studio Thinking has been
used in promising ways by a variety of
audiences for a number of purposes. The
remainder of this paper describes four of those
contexts.
(1) A language for reform.
The most extensive use of Studio Thinking to
date has been in Alameda County, California,
a county of about 1.5 million people and 18
public school districts located just east of San
Francisco. An Alliance for Arts Learning
54
Creative learning
Leadership (http://www.artiseducation.org/)
begun there in 1999 includes five stakeholder
communities: K-12 educators, higher
education colleges and universities, parents
and community organisations, artists and
cultural organisations, and resource
organisations (e.g., funders, school reform
organisations). The Alliance’s goal has been to
re-establish the arts as a central component of
public education given that the state’s arts
education infrastructure had been gradually
dismantled as a consequence of tax-relief
measures from the early 1980s.
In 2003, the Alameda County Office of
Education, the California College of the Arts,
and Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education began a pilot project
funded by the US Department of Education.
We worked with five visual art teachers and
fifteen K-8 teachers who set out to improve
instruction by using the Studio Thinking and
the Teaching for Understanding frameworks
(Blythe et al, 1998) along with practices for
Making Learning Visible (Project Zero &
Reggio Children, 2001). Arts teachers used
Studio Thinking to support assessment of
learning, and non-arts teachers worked with all
three thinking frames (Perkins, 1986; 1987) to
learn to teach arts in general classroom
contexts, both as stand-alone and integrated
instruction.
When the project concluded in mid-2006, the
Alliance set in motion a county-wide project,
funded by the US Department of Education
and the Ford, Hewlett, and Haas Foundations,
to spread what had been learned to all 18
school districts over the next five years. That
process is now well underway, and ‘Studio
Thinking’ is a pillar of this endeavour. Three
lead districts are enacting plans for developing
capacity for arts teaching and learning among
their faculties. These districts partner with arts
organizations who provide ongoing coaching
and collaborate in running summer institutes to
educate district teachers about teaching the
arts rigorously. Six more districts are beginning
to carry out the early stages of their own
district arts plans, and nine more are creating
plans for their district’s arts development.
The Alliance also advocates for the arts at the
state level, and California’s governor
responded to advocacy efforts by going from
$0 to $105 million annually for district support
of ongoing professional development in arts
education, along with a one-time grant of $500
million to districts to rebuild arts and physical
education infrastructure.
art education faculty feels confident in moving
students into schools, students must, at
minimum, demonstrate the ability to manage a
class. But we expect much more!
I teach this course and see it as my chance to
convey to students the importance of focusing
teaching on student learning and growth, on
creating a supportive and nurturing a
community of learning with colleagues and
students, and on developing the habits of a
reflective practitioner who looks, considers,
decides, and assesses instructional revision in
ongoing, iterative ways. The Studio Habits are
one of two main tools for doing that (the other
is the Teaching for Understanding Framework,
Blythe et al, 1998).
(2) Professional development
Over the past decade when facilitating
professional development, various copresenters have urged me not to overwhelm
teachers with too much information – too many
frameworks, too many intentions, too rich a
meal. But I’m always tempted to reveal the full
menu of possibilities, because any one teacher
might want to tackle different parts first.
There’s no set sequence of instruction for
learning to use the thinking frames that
support a focus on student learning for
understanding, professional community, and
reflective practice, and teachers learn as
differently as students. There are many
pathways to competence, and the critical
nuggets vary for different people.
Pre-service teachers: At the Massachusetts
College of Art and Design, students in
beginner-teacher courses work under close
faculty supervision in a 12-week course to
design and co-teach eight, 2.5 hour classes to
Boston-area students who take Saturday
morning art classes at the college. Before the
In this class, I have not held back. In the first
four weeks, before students enter their own
classrooms, I flood them with what we call ‘the
tsunami.’ They read and plan with Studio
Thinking (Hetland et al, 2007), the Teaching
for Understanding Guide (Blythe et al, 1998),
Louise Music, Coordinator of Arts Education
for the county and a founding member of the
Alliance, holds Studio Thinking as the ‘lingua
franca’ of the initiative. By stating explicitly the
kinds of thinking the arts require and the
teaching structures through which art
educators teach such thinking, Studio Thinking
serves as a sort of Rosetta Stone for us to
translate the potential of the arts across
disciplines, audiences, and contexts.
Creative learning
55
and Saphier and Gower’s Skillful Teacher
(1997). It is obviously too much to expect a
beginning teacher to internalise in just four
weeks, before they’ve met any students or
learned the basics of managing a group. But I
acknowledge with my students this ‘too
muchness’ (usually repeatedly) and that their
job is to let it all wash over them and grab onto
whatever keeps them afloat. The goal is to
swim in these waters. I assure them that, by
doing so, they’ll eventually understand how to
navigate with the full complement of tools in
the face of a full range of challenges – they’ll
learn to facilitate serious learning about
important content, manage a group, build
rapport, operate professionally, plan usefully,
and reflect thoughtfully.
Young professionals: Studio Thinking
My students see that the Studio Habits focus
them on disciplinary understanding in visual
arts and aids them in building rapport, working
professionally with others, and managing
groups of students. They experience the value
of making mistakes, reflecting on them, and
sharing them with a group of trusted
colleagues who support them. They
experience teaching and learning as
collaborative endeavours, how art offers
limitless opportunities for engagement, depth,
and development, and how reflection on
actions in relation to Studio Thinking’s
categories supports their development as
teachers of critical and creative visual arts
understanding.
Arts teachers at this level began to analyse
their own instruction with the Studio Habits and
redesign lessons to focus more on meaning
(express), imagination (envisioning), and
exploration (stretch & explore). For
experienced non-arts teachers newly required
to teach arts, Studio Thinking seems like a
lifeline. They have few resources for thinking
about how and what to teach, beyond
technique, that might be learned through visual
art instruction and experiences. One teacher of
language arts expressed her appreciation of
the Studio Thinking framework in this way:
Though management, too, is fundamental for
beginning teachers, the Studio Thinking
framework helps my students begin their
careers as they need to continue, treating
teaching as a creative endeavour based in a
disciplinary field and domain to which they
each develop and contribute in ongoing,
individual and collective ways.
56
Creative learning
has also been useful with young teachers who
have moved beyond the status of beginners
and have either a handful of years in the art
classroom or are experienced teachers in nonarts contexts and who are tackling art teaching
for the first time. For these groups, Studio
Thinking has been valuable in two ways:
Studio Structures suggests simple ways to
design instructional sequences to teach; and
Studio Habits, which help them understand
and make explicit to themselves and their
students (and others) what they want to teach
and have students learn. Studio Habits also
help them to see more in their classrooms and
to assess the understanding their students
develop in a more informed fashion.
I think the parts I understand are really
useful in terms of the different kinds of ways
of structuring time. They gave me an
opening and shifting in my thinking,
sculpting out my lesson in terms of thinking
about when you are talking and when are
kids working. I really like that. I can name
that. I love that. I can see that.
Experienced teachers: While many
experienced teachers saw Studio Thinking as
a resource from the start that helped them to
develop ways to support students’ thinking
processes and self-reflection about arts
learning, others were more sceptical. One
experienced teacher said that the Studio
Habits affirmed what she already did, but she
did not see how they added anything to her
teaching. ‘Well, to me it’s a way of organising
ideas but it’s nothing we haven’t always done.’
As she worked with Studio Thinking, however,
she saw that it helped her communicate with
her students about what she valued, and it
helped her students to speak in greater depth
and with more sophistication about artworks.
Over time, all the experienced teachers with
whom we’ve worked have expressed
appreciation similar to teachers with less
experience. These teachers were able to
name what they were doing that worked, to
see more clearly the areas of their teaching
that they wanted to develop, and, most
importantly, to communicate with students
what they valued in a shared, simple language
that accommodated the broadest range of
their intentions and supported self-, peer-, and
teacher assessments of learning.
comment more thoughtfully on each others’
work. I have begun using the Studio Habits to
assess progress in college-aged art education
students, recently piloting a form that captures
and communicates my impressions of
students’ work and working during final
reviews.
Based on our analyses of student learning with
the Studio Habits, I used four continua of
growth, developed first by Kimberly Sheridan
(Sheridan & Hetland, 2007), that can be
evidenced in student work: discrete to
integrated handling of knowledge networks,
rigid to flexible approaches to thinking, judging
quality dependently to autonomously, and
being motivated by others’ (e.g., assignments)
to self- and/or field-motivated work.
(3) Assessing learning. Studio Habits
Lower levels along these continua are
metaphorically equivalent to a solid state of
matter – handling of knowledge, approach to
thinking, making of judgments, and motivation
are discrete, algorithmic, bounded, and
external. Mid-levels are analogically equivalent
to a liquid state of matter – categories are
more permeable, fluid, related, responsive,
and internally provoked. At the highest levels,
thinking is more like a gaseous state of matter:
It is highly interactive and instantaneously
responsive; expertise is tacit; and categorical
distinctions are nearly dissolved in the
immediacies of practice.
have great potential in supporting the
assessment of learning in the arts. Teachers
with whom we’ve worked have designed
systems of anecdotal record-keeping through
notes and photographic images, ways to
reflect on and reveal growth through portfolios
of student work, and ways to structure
critiques so that students see more and
Most promising about this pilot was the ready
understanding of the analogy by the art
education students. Also, the structure allowed
me to see patterns in students’ work that were
otherwise invisible or difficult to convey, and
the format supported very personalised
responses that captured and conveyed in
Creative learning
57
Figure 1 States of Matter metaphor to describe levels of learning
Integrated
Flexible
Autonomous
Self-field
Discrete
Rigid
Dependent
Other Motivated
qualitative terms the wide diversity of students’
approaches, thinking, and development. The
system did not result in a quantitative
assessment, however, and could not
contribute at this stage to a numerical average
of any sort. It is, however, useful as diagnostic
and formative assessment.
(4) Mechanisms for transfer. The
question of cognitive transfer is complex and
vexed. As David Perkins suggested after the
results of our REAP meta-analyses (Reviewing
Education and the Arts, Winner & Hetland,
2000), ‘it is important to stand back from their
findings [about lack of transfer] and ask
whether the game is essentially over…. Some
would say that it had never really begun’
(Perkins, 2001, p. 117).
58
Creative learning
The Studio Habits of Mind offer a vehicle to
consider mechanisms of transfer of learning
between art and other disciplines. We recently
proposed a study exploring whether and to
what extent envisioning learned in visual art
informs the visualisation required in geometry
(Goldsmith, Hetland, & Winner, 2008). If such
is the case, rigorous art instruction may be a
pathway of equitable access to higher-level
mathematics and science for students who
would otherwise not have the requisite skills
for success in such endeavours. Similarly,
Studio Habits might help researchers examine
mechanisms for supporting language
development in some populations with visual
arts instruction (e.g. Reflect: Question &
Explain might offer practice in thinking,
speaking, reading, and writing, while Engage &
Persist supports motivation for sustained
focus); or explaining why arts might support
scientific thought (e.g. Stretch & Explore might
support an approach to error that is productive
in investigating scientific phenomena); or why
visual art might contribute to historical
understanding (e.g. Observe might nurture
taking reasoned, multiple perspectives on
historical events).
This brief tour of contexts and audiences who
have used Studio Thinking suggests the
potential I believe the framework holds for
enhancing education when creativity is a
desired outcome.
Teachers, too, can benefit from use of the
Studio Habits when planning, teaching, and/or
assessing interdisciplinary and/or artsintegrated units of instruction. Generalist
teachers in the Alameda County projects have
increased their intentional uses of art to
support learning in the academic subjects, and
the Studio Habits help to orient that planning.
For example, one teacher’s visual art unit on
homelessness (Todd Elkin’s ‘Do-It-Yourself
Homeless Shelters’ unit in Boix Mansilla,
manuscript in preparation) exemplifies the
potential connections between art and history.
As students considered the purposes and
aesthetics of shelter, explored construction
materials gleaned from local dumpsters,
designed and built shelters that
accommodated at least one person, and used
surface and ornamental treatments to convey
personal meaning and aesthetic, they became
more deeply aware of the issues of
homelessness and the importance of taking
action to solve this societal dilemma locally
and globally. As a tool supporting creative
thinking, the Studio Habits helped the teacher
focus the unit on understanding the
contemporary art world’s commitments to
social critique and action, on artistic
envisioning, and on stretching & exploring,
while also developing craft, the capacity to
engage & persist, and reflect on and develop
criteria for quality.
Creative learning
59
References
Blythe, T., & the Researchers and Teachers of
the Teaching for Understanding Project.
(1998). The Teaching for Understanding
Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Boix Mansilla, V. (manuscript in preparation).
The Dimensions of Understanding Guide. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow
and the psychology of discovery and invention.
New York: HarperCollins.
Efland, A. (2004). ‘Emerging visions of art
education’, pp 691-699 in E. Eisner & M. Day
(Eds.), Handbook of Research and Policy in
Art Education. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Goldsmith, L., Hetland, L., & Winner, E.
(2008). Can visual arts learning promote
geometric reasoning: A transfer study.
Proposal to the National Science Foundation,
Empirical Frontier proposal, Category 2:
Cognitive processes underlying STEM
learning/teaching.
Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., &
Sheridan, K. M. (2007). Studio Thinking: The
Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. New
York: Teachers' College Press
Perkins, D. (1983). The mind’s best work.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Perkins, D.N. (1986). ‘Thinking frames’.
Educational Leadership, 43 (8), 4–10.
Perkins, D.N. (1987). ‘Thinking frames: An
integrative perspective on teaching cognitive
skills’, pp 41-61 in J. B. Baron & R. J.
Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking skills:
Theory and practice. New York: W. H.
Freeman.
60
Creative learning
Perkins, D. (1994). The intelligent eye: learning
to think by looking at art. Los Angeles: J. Paul
Getty Center for Education in the Arts.
Perkins, D. (2001). ‘Embracing Babel: The
prospects of instrumental uses of the arts for
education’, pp 117-124 in E. Winner & L.
Hetland (Eds.), Beyond the soundbite: Arts
education and academic outcomes. Los
Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust.
Perkins, D.N., Jay, E., & Tishman, S. (1993).
‘Beyond abilities: A dispositional theory of
thinking’. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39 (1),
1–21.
Project Zero, Reggio Children. (2001). Making
learning visible: Children as individual and
group learners. Reggio Emelia, Italy: Reggio
Children.
Saphier, J., & Gower, R. (1997). The skillful
teacher: Building your teaching skills. Boston,
MA: Research for Better Teaching.
Sheridan, K., & Hetland, L. (2007). Looking for
mind in student work: Assessing development
of the Studio Habits of Mind. Symposium
conducted at the annual meeting of the
National Art Education Association, March 14 –
18, New York City, New York.
Winner, E., & Hetland, L. (Eds.). (2000). ‘The
arts and academic achievement: What the
evidence shows’. Journal of Aesthetic
Education, 34 (3/4).
Winner, E., & Hetland, L. (Eds.). (2001).
Proceedings from ‘Beyond the soundbite:
What the research actually shows about arts
education and academic outcomes.’ Los
Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust.
creative learning
5
creative learning
and new
technology?
a provocation
paper
Avril Loveless
In the past ten years of education policy initiatives and change, both
information and communication technologies (ICT) and creativity
have been themes which have attracted attention, activity and
resources. Each are perceived to be worthy of support, yet each are
complex, and the interaction between creativity and new
technologies raises challenging issues for educators. This paper is
therefore presented in the context of work developed in these two
significant, yet troublesome, areas over a period of change in
practice and policy.
Our understandings of the term ‘creative
learning’ are emergent. At first, I thought it to
be somewhat contrived, but have been
interested in the thought-provoking work of
colleagues. (see for example Craft, Cremin, &
Burnard, 2008; Craft, Jeffrey, & Leibling, 2001;
Jeffrey, 2006). The discussions and projects
associated with the ideas help us to look a
little differently at creative experiences in
varieties of environments. There is useful work
being done to describe, explain and
reconceptualise ‘creative learning’, and draw
attention to the complexities in policy, practice,
theory and research. In this provocation paper
I will discuss my understandings of some
current approaches to creative learning, and
make links to my wider understandings of
creativity and the role of digital technologies as
tools in creative processes. I will make some
observations on how imagination, experience
and meaning can be observed and worked out
in some of the projects in which I’ve been
engaged in the last dozen years and then
pose some questions for further discussion. I
suggest that questions about models of
creative learning and formal sets of
programmes for evaluating progression might
be inappropriate and simplistic, failing to
recognise not only the complex interactions
62
Creative learning
between learners, teachers, knowledge and
tools, but also the wider contexts and
connections in which these interactions take
place.
Creative learning and creativity
The development of discussions, projects and
understandings of the term ‘creative learning’
have been well documented, tracing the policy,
practice and research in creativity in education
over the past two decades in the UK and
internationally (Craft, 2005; Craft et al, 2008;
Craft et al, 2001; Jeffrey, 2006; NACCCE,
1999; Spendlove & Wyse, 2008; Troman,
Jeffrey, & Raggl, 2007). Creative learning can
be considered from different perspectives,
either as the learning which enables creativity
to be expressed, or the imaginative activity
supporting learning and intellectual enquiry.
Woods and Jeffrey (1997) suggest that
creative learning includes innovation and a
radical shift, ownership of knowledge which
makes a difference to the learner, and control
of learning processes through intrinsic
motivation. Craft et al (2008) discuss the
encapsulation of imaginative achievement, the
creation of new knowledge, judgements of
originality and value in different domain
contexts, and a useful focus on imagination
and experience to develop learning.
In the research and project activity in which
I’ve been engaged in recent years, we have
worked with an understanding of creativity as
in the interaction between people and
communities, creative processes, subject
domains, place, tools, and wider social and
cultural contexts (Loveless, 2002). This has
enabled us to explore not only the
characteristics, dispositions and processes of
individuals and groups, but also to pay
attention to the subject domains in which
conceptual connections are made and new
knowledge constructed; the places or ‘niches’
where creativity can flourish or decline; the
tools and technologies that shape the creative
activities; and the wider social and cultural
influences that provide contexts for
judgements of originality, purpose and value.
Creative learning for individuals and
communities is an important element emerging
in this interaction, but cannot be easily
separated or isolated from the others.
The QCA identified five elements of creative
learning which could be recognised in learners’
behaviours: asking questions, making
connections, imagining what might be,
exploring options, and reflecting critically
(QCA, 2005). We have also given attention to
the processes of fashioning as the active and
deliberate attention in order to shape, define
and manage an idea, often with particular tools
and media; and flow - where the person’s
capacity was being stretched despite elements
of challenge, difficulty or risk (Csikszentmihalyi,
1996; NACCCE, 1999).
Creativity, technology and
learning
In 2002 Futurelab commissioned me to review
the research and policy literature on the
teaching and learning of creativity with
information and communications technologies
(ICT) at that time. In 2007, there was an
update to identify what progress, if any, had
been made in the field. I argued that there had
been a growth of activity in the development of
Creative learning
63
policy, practice, digital resources and research;
each of which played a role in the nurturing of
creative processes, environments, and
outcomes. It was noticeable too that the
sharper focus on creativity has also raised
awareness of some of the ‘tensions and
dilemmas’ which face educators as they place
debates about pedagogy and curriculum in the
wider landscape of the economic, social and
cultural purposes of education in our society
(Loveless, 2002, 2007a).
These reviews drew attention to two ways of
approaching the affordances of digital tools for
creativity, first, in active learning processes,
and secondly in creative endeavour and
outcomes. One way of looking at digital
technologies in use is to focus on the ‘ICT
capability’ of learners, which relates to
understanding and competence in the general
processes of dealing with information. The
word ‘capability’ carries the meanings of
having power or fitness for a task, being
qualified and able, being open to or
susceptible to development and implies a
knowledge or skill being turned to use: an
ability which is used actively, involving
understanding and choice (Loveless, 2003a).
A development of understandings of ICT
capability includes the recognition and
exploitation of the affordances of the
technologies for learning. Digital technologies
can be tools which afford learners the potential
to extend or enhance their abilities, allow users
to create novel ways of dealing with tasks
which might then change the nature of the
activity itself, or provide limitations and
structure which influence the nature and
boundaries of the activity. The potential lies not
in the technologies themselves, but in the
interaction with human intention and activity.
64
Creative learning
Conole and Dyke offer a taxonomy of the
affordances of ICT as accessibility; speed of
change; diversity; communication and
collaboration; reflection; multimodal and nonlinear; risk, fragility and uncertainty; immediacy;
monopolization and surveillance (Conole &
Dyke, 2004). Fisher et al (2006) identified
clusters of purposeful approaches to learning
with digital technologies, in which there are a
number of connections with ideas of creative
learning:
•
Knowledge building: adapting and
developing ideas; modelling; representing
understanding in multimodal and dynamic
ways;
•
Distributed cognition: accessing
resources; finding things out; writing,
composing and presenting with mediating
artefacts and tools;
•
Community and communication:
exchanging and sharing communication;
extending the context of activity; extending
the participating community at local and
global levels; and
•
Engagement: exploring and playing;
acknowledging risk and uncertainty; working
with different dimensions of interactivity;
responding to immediacy.
The use of digital tools in creative endeavour
and outcomes in physical and virtual learning
environments was reviewed using the following
framework:
•
developing ideas: supporting
imaginative conjecture, exploration and
representation of ideas;
•
making connections: supporting,
challenging, informing and developing ideas
by making connections with information,
people, projects and resources;
•
creating and making: engaging in
making meanings though fashioning
processes of capture, manipulation and
transformation of media;
•
collaboration: working with others in
immediate and dynamic ways to collaborate
on outcomes and construct shared
knowledge; and
•
communication and evaluation:
publishing and communicating outcomes for
evaluation and critique from a range of
audiences.
The range of creative activity with digital
technologies is wide. Creative imagination not
only generates ideas, but also discerns those
with potential for growth, and there are many
examples of digital tools for conjectural play,
exploration and developing ideas, from Logo
(Papert, 1980) to simulations and multi-player
online games offering opportunities for direct
‘hands-and-minds-on’ experiences (Shaffer,
2007). Network technologies offer
opportunities for making connections with
information, case studies, exemplar materials,
resources, and creative practitioners in formal
and informal settings – from international
galleries and museums, to small scale
webcam connections. ArtisanCam, for
example, is a website which uses video and
interactive activities to introduce children to the
work and lives of contemporary artists www.artisancam.org.uk. Social software, such
as Flickr and del.icio.us, enables users to
categorise and retrieve web content, tracing
the links made by others.
Digital technologies have long been used to
create and make meaning, from early
manipulations of text and image with word
processors and painting programmes to the
composition and presentation of multimedia,
music and digital movies. Creative
collaborations are possible in the networks and
exchange of material. ‘Virtual Puppeteers’, for
example, allows children in different places to
use virtual ‘space’ or ‘studios’ to create their
own 3D designs for puppets and work together
online to write their own plays. Such activity
can offer a distinctive contribution to
collaborations across time and place,
engaging new audiences and disrupting
traditional structures and commercial interests.
In recent years there have been lively
developments in tools for communicating and
publishing creative outcomes, from Facebook
to YouTube, for showcasing, feedback,
tagging, and networking both content and
personal links and connections. A recent and
interesting development has been in the use of
‘context-aware’ mobile technologies, which are
able to detect and respond to locating signals
in the immediate environment using
applications such as GPS, Bluetooth, or infrared beacons placed in a space. These devices
can bring together experiences of physical and
virtual spaces where people can interact with
the environments, each other and information
from many sources associated with a
location7. There is evidence, therefore, of the
wide scope of creative activity with digital tools
in education, through the enthusiasm of pupils
and teachers engaging with a variety of
technologies as well as through partnerships
with experienced creative practitioners. How
then might digital technologies shape the
‘terrain’ for creative learning, and how might
such work affect pedagogy and curriculum?
7 For examples of ‘Mediascapes’ which enable users to link text, sounds and images to landscapes, see www.mscapers.com, and see
the large scale interactive work of electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at www.lozano-hemmer.com).
Creative learning
65
Imagination, experience and
meaning
Despite work in research projects in the field of
creativity and digital technologies in
collaboration with creative practitioners over
many years, and the development of a number
of modules in teacher education courses, this
field is still a great challenge. In the 1990s, we
worked on such projects as the Glebe Project,
Access, and Art on the Net, focusing on artists
working in schools using digital technologies in
their visual imagery, performance and
sculpture (Loveless, 1997; 2003b; Loveless &
Taylor, 2000). In the recently completed
CREATE project with student teachers using
digital video in primary schools, we have
adopted action research models to explore
understandings of creativity and pedagogy
with student and newly qualified teachers
(Loveless, Burton & Turvey, 2006). In all our
work we have been encountering similar
issues in realising the potential of digital tools;
in placing such work in the curriculum; in
documenting, evaluating and assessing the
outcomes; and in developing pedagogy with
the substance and flair needed to provoke and
promote the learners’ imagination and
experience in a meaningful way.
Digital tools
The tools used in making work are integral to
the nature of the creative dialogue between
the ‘maker’ and the ‘made’, and the nature of
the digital tools themselves present
challenges. In the early days of photography
and film making, people made work that
looked like painting and theatre, falling back on
familiar forms and taking a while to become
66
Creative learning
familiar with the new tools and create ideas in
a manner unique to the medium. It can take
time to learn the range of techniques, as well
as understand the distinctive contribution that
each bring to making meaning (Mitchell, 1994).
Without careful design and preparation in the
projects and interventions, creative
engagement with digital technologies could be
superficial and instrumental, missing
opportunities for experiences of fashioning and
flow. One teacher commented, for example,
that creativity was about making pretty things
and that he used graphics software to reduce
the mess of paint. Early examples of visual
work often relied on mimicry of images created
in other media, rather than engaging with the
characteristics of the digital to make meaning.
Some did recognise the need to understand
digital technologies as a different medium and
tool, which would take time to become familiar
and distinctive. A secondary Art teacher noted
pupil tantrums when they were frustrated by
digital technologies just as much as when they
were first introduced to acrylic paint, as they
had to learn how to use the particular
characteristics and limitations of the media.
Multimedia tools demanded approaches to
digital literacy which incorporated
hypertextuality, iconic association and
interactivity, rather than merely linear
presentations. The tools of digital movie
making offered learners opportunities to
collaborate in teams and play a number of
roles – scriptwriter, director, actor, camera
operator, and editor, each requiring a different
capability with a range of techniques with
digital tools. After completing a movie in an
intensive day, one child suggested that ‘the
editing was hard, annoying, frustrating and it
got on my nerves sometimes…but if we didn’t
do that it would have been a rubbish movie’.
Recognising the affordances of the digital tools
for realizing and fashioning imaginative ideas
requires an understanding of the aesthetic
challenge, not only of the technologies and
techniques, but also of the connections
between the tools and the conceptual domain
of the ideas.
The curriculum
The curriculum is at the core of making
meaning in education, situated as it is within
the wider purpose and value of education
systems in our society. In the ICT curriculum,
there is ambiguity between the construction
and presentation of ICT as a subject, and ICT
as tools for learning ‘embedded’ in a range of
subject domains. Engaging with imaginative
starting points, drawing upon and developing
experiences of fashioning and flow, and
relating creative activity to a wider purpose
and relevance to the lives of pupils and the
concepts of the subject domain are not
processes which are widely seen in the
practice of ICT in schools. The National
Curriculum for ICT is presented as processes
for developing higher order capabilities: finding
things out, developing ideas and making things
happen, and exchanging and sharing
information. Yet the focus can be on the
teaching of ICT applications related to
business productivity and the world of work,
rather than making connections between the
wider cultural experiences of the students and
the intellectual demands of the content of the
curriculum. Facility with the tools can mask a
superficial understanding of the ways of
knowing in the activity. Capturing a moment on
digital video and showcasing it on YouTube is
not necessarily a creative act. Indeed, Tara
Brabazon, refers to ‘Google, the white bread of
the mind’, in her call for critical engagement
with information and other people in our
mediated world (Brabazon, 2007). The
Enquiring Minds approach8 highlights the
interaction between the knowledge that
students bring and questions that they wish to
ask, with the wider context of the social,
cultural and political purposes of education.
Digital tools are technologies which are
shaping our times, and we need a critical,
active engagement to counter technological
determinism.
Evaluating and assessing
creative learning with digital
technologies
Understanding progression in the creative use
of digital tools is a challenge. We don’t yet
know much about how such tools make a
developmental difference in learning activities
for 5, 10, 15 and 20 year olds, and perhaps
there is much more work to be done here. We
may, however, be in danger of focusing on the
technologies instead of the purpose and
nature of the use of the tools, thereby
trivialising the quality of the learning and
opportunities for development. The National
Curriculum ‘levels’ can be seen to adopt a
somewhat broad-brush approach to
developments in awareness, use and
evaluation of technologies in relation to
information, but the conceptual domains are
not yet well explored. Digital tools also offer
opportunities for the imaginative remix of
digital information from a wide range of
sources and domains. This can raise
interesting questions about how and who to
8 See http://www.enquiringminds.org.uk/
Creative learning
67
assess. Additionally, Lessig (2004) urges us to
understand the implications of these tools in
matters of intellectual property and copyright
for future creativity and voice 9.
One project which holds promise in this area
of the role of digital tools in evaluation and
assessment of learning is Project e-scape at
the Technology Education Research Unit at
Goldsmiths, University of London10. Pupils use
hand held digital tools to support the
processes involved in a course work activity
and the building up of a dynamic portfolio. The
portfolio supports the assessment of
imagination and innovation in the work in
progress as well as final products. I suggest
that this approach offers possibilities for further
research in creative learning, evaluation and
assessment, and the pedagogic ‘kick back’ for
teachers observing the pupils’ activity and use
of digital tools.
Developing pedagogy: Teacher
artistry with digital tools
In our various projects we have noted two
significant characteristics of pedagogy which
offer space for creative learning with digital
technologies: preparation to improvise, and
skilful neglect (Labett, 1988; Loveless, 2007b).
In these times, teachers are generally very
good at planning learning objectives and
teaching strategies. There is, however, a
noticeable difference between being well
planned, and being well-prepared. Being
prepared is an aspect of teacher professional
knowledge that is ‘draft’ in character, engaged
in design of opportunities and possibilities for
pupils, and that requires an openness of mind
in the moment of the relationship between
content, teacher and pupil. The metaphor of
jazz can be applied to discussions of teacher
performance of professional knowledge, where
‘the best teachers are not only well prepared,
but also practised and skilful improvisers’
(Humphreys & Hyland, 2002:11). Such
openness of mind helps to make a link
between the careful, organized preparation
and planning for teaching, and the interactions
in the moments of teaching that are
unscripted, yet enable teachers and pupils to
make conceptual connections within subject
domains. These unscripted moments can be
described as experiences of improvisation
when the artistry of teaching is expressed and
performed. Student teachers making digital
movies with children remarked that they hadn’t
realised ‘how much they knew’, until they were
able to draw upon their understandings of the
potential and constraints of the digital tools,
conventions of film and media literacy, and
their knowledge of conceptual meanings being
expressed in the movies. ‘Skilful neglect’ is a
term used twenty years ago by Labbett writing
of her observations of teaching with Logo, and
developing strategies for stepping back and
offering a safe space for learners to explore,
make mistakes, and solve problems (Labett,
1988). Our own observations of teachers and
creative practitioners have recognised this
approach where there is both a confidence in
expertise with the subject domain and the
digital tools, as well as a commitment to
supporting active, creative learning for the
pupils. Such pedagogic approaches can be
disruptive to more familiar models of
organising time, groupings and resources.
These challenges are not insurmountable in
terms of organisation, yet require an
understanding of the benefits of loosening up,
slowing down and creating space.
9 See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/187
10 See http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/teru/projectinfo.php?projectName=projectescape
68
Creative learning
Final questions
Although, as I noted in my opening
paragraphs, our understanding of creative
learning is emergent, I have tried here to show
how the study of the creative use of ICT may
offer interesting opportunities and challenging
perspectives to help us develop that
understanding. We learn in interaction with
each other and with a variety of tools and
artefacts in our culture (Salomon, 1993).
Digital technologies are ‘tools in our times’, the
contemporary artefacts of our information
society. As we develop our practice, policy and
strategies for the use of ICT in education, we
need to be mindful of not only the narratives of
standards, targets, achievement,
performativity, and progress with ICT, but also
the positive contribution of the tension,
uncertainty, contradiction and risk in exploring
the terrain of creative learning with these
technologies.
• How do we articulate key questions for
research and professional development in
evaluating and assessing creativity with
digital tools without missing the point, or
perpetuating inappropriate goals for
assessment?
• How do we recognise, develop and mentor
professional knowledge which creates
space for improvisation and skilful neglect
with digital tools?
My final comments are framed as questions
because this field is growing and contested. I
would hope that as our discussion of creative
learning settles and becomes more widely
understood that it can take on board these
issues.
• How might we encourage the
understanding of the affordances of digital
technologies in relationship to the purposes
of creative activities, providing clearer
expectations of, and more time for
imaginative exploration, fashioning and flow
with these tools?
• How might we encourage approaches such
as Enquiring Minds to construct a
curriculum which reflects learning with
imagination, experience and meaning in our
‘Knowledge Society’?
Creative learning
69
References
Brabazon, T. (2007). The University of Google:
Education in the (post) information age.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Conole, G., & Dyke, M. (2004). ‘What are the
affordances of information and communication
technologies?’ ALT-J, Research in Learning
Technology, 12 (2), 113 - 124.
Craft, A. (2005). Creativity in Schools: tensions
and dilemmas. London: Routledge.
Loveless, A. (2003a). ‘The interaction between
primary teachers’ perceptions of ICT and their
pedagogy’. Education and Information
Technologies, 8 (4), 313-326.
Craft, A., Cremin, T., Burnard, P. (Eds.) (2008).
Creative Learning 3-11 and How we Document
It. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books
Loveless, A. (2003b). ‘Making a Difference? An
Evaluation of Professional Knowledge and
Pedagogy in Art and ICT’. The International
Journal of Art and Design Education, 22 (2),
145 - 154.
Craft, A., Jeffrey, B., & Leibling, M. (Eds.).
(2001). Creativity in Education. London:
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Loveless, A. (2007a). Creativity, technology
and learning: a review of recent literature
(Update). Bristol: Futurelab.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow
and the psychology of discovery and invention.
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Loveless, A. (2007b). ‘Preparing to teach with
ICT: subject knowledge, Didaktik and
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Fisher, T., Higgins, C., & Loveless, A. (2006).
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Humphreys, M., & Hyland, T. (2002). 'Theory,
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Labbett, B. (1988). ‘Skilful neglect’, pp 89 - 104
in J. Schostak (Ed.), Breaking into the
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Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: The nature
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Loveless, A., Burton, J., & Turvey, K. (2006).
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Creative learning
71
creative learning
6
the assessment
of creative
learning
Sue Ellis and Myra Barrs
The size of the challenge
When in Spring 2006 the research team at the Centre for Literacy in
Primary Education (CLPE)11 embarked on the development of an
assessment that would focus on learning in the creative arts – the
Creative Learning Assessment (CLA) – we were fully aware of the
contentious nature of the task, and the size of the challenge.
Creativity itself is a contested issue: attempts to pin down what it is,
to arrive at some kind of quintessential definition, are more often than
not hollow and unsatisfactory. The assessment of creativity is even
more strongly contested – some people would say that it is neither
possible nor desirable to assess creativity. We sympathise with this
view – attempts to assess creativity in general are likely to run into
the sand. But we also feel that it is both possible and potentially
valuable to assess creative work and creative learning.
It is difficult to assess any complex learning;
breaking down higher level abilities into
discrete criteria is rarely an adequate solution.
In creative learning these difficulties are
compounded: if creativity involves originality
and the use of the individual imagination, how
can these qualities be judged against a set of
predetermined criteria? The assessment of
creative work will always involve interpretation
and negotiation.
Creative learning challenges conventional
thinking about assessment and demands
changes in forms of assessment. For this very
reason it was an area that CLPE wanted to get
involved in. We have a long-standing interest
in classroom-based assessment and its
potential educational benefits. Assessment
always influences practice and creates
backwash into the curriculum – but in our
experience assessment could create positive
backwash, influencing teaching and learning in
constructive and helpful ways.
11 http://www.clpe.co.uk/
74
Creative learning
A bottom-up development
The development of the CLA came about as a
consequence of a request from a group of
primary school head teachers in the CfBT
Education Action Zone (EAZ) in North
Lambeth, London. They had defined the need
for an assessment that would enable them and
their staff to evaluate the creative learning
going on in their schools that they were unable
to observe and describe in any systematic
way. They wanted to be able to focus
evaluation on creative learning so that they
could better represent pupils’ progress to
parents, governors, and in particular to
OfSTED. Armed with this request from the
grassroots, the CfBT EAZ and CLPE applied
jointly to the CfBT for funds to develop an
assessment and pilot it over the course of a
whole school year.
The head teachers in North Lambeth felt that
recent government initiatives and statements
on creativity provided an opportunity to make
creative and artistic learning count for more in
their schools. Many of the teaching staff in
these schools were inexperienced in teaching
across a broad curriculum; their training had
foregrounded the core subjects of Literacy,
Numeracy and Science and focused on the
literacy and numeracy strategies. The
development of an assessment for Creative
Arts learning would be a means of
professional development; it would help
teachers to focus on the encouragement and
analysis of work in the creative arts.
Head teachers also believed that the
introduction of the Self Evaluation Framework
(SEF) for OfSTED inspections12 offered them
a major opportunity to set the agenda for
inspections and to direct inspectors’ attention
to areas of substantial achievement, such as
the creative arts, which they felt were being
marginalised by existing inspection
procedures.
This was an opportunity to work in partnership
with a group of interested schools, many of
them in areas of social deprivation, which were
prepared to give time and support to an
extended development project.
Starting points
We were influenced from the outset by the
work of Donald Schon (1987) and Elliott Eisner
(2002) on what Schon called ‘reflection-inaction’. Schon and Eisner saw on-the-job
reflection as being at the heart of creative
learning and its assessment. We also drew on
the work of the Assessment Reform Group
and on Black et al’s book, Assessment for
Learning (2003), which showed how important
self-assessment and reflection was in pupils
making progress.
We explored work on portfolio assessment
and electronic portfolios (Barrett, 2000). We
were aware that only a portfolio approach
would help teachers to capture the range of
creative work that children would engage in
during a school year and sought means of
making portfolio assessment user-friendly and
doable.
The Lambeth head teachers had asked for
some means of relating achievement in
creative learning to progress in academic
areas. We aimed to provide them with ways of
assessing literacy which would be compatible
with their assessments of creative learning.
12 See the Ofsted website for more information on this: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Forms-and-guidance/Browse-all-formsand-guidance-by/Title-A-to-Z/Self-evaluation-forms-writing-a-SEF-that-works/(language)/eng-GB
Creative learning
75
We consulted studies of the effects and
effectiveness of arts education, in particular
the relationship between involvement in the
arts and academic achievement (Harland et al
2000, Harland et al 2005) and the cautionary
report edited by Winner and Hetland (2000).
The assessment of learning in the creative arts
has generated diverse models of assessment,
from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress’ standardised assessment tasks
(White & Vanneman, 1998) to small scale
studies in a particular domain, such as Shirley
Brice Heath and Shelby Wolf’s Dramatic
Learning in the Primary School (2005). We
were strongly influenced by a landmark report
from the Assessment of Performance Unit
(APU) on the assessment of Design and
Technology (Kimbell et al, 1991) that contained
a thorough discussion of holistic assessment
and how it can be underpinned by descriptions
and a shared assessment vocabulary rather
than sets of discrete criteria.
We drew on the recent work of Anna Craft et
al on progression in creative learning (2006).
This comprehensive attempt to define
progression in creative learning tested a
general model of progression in relation to
development in two domains – music and
writing.
Our own approach to assessment in creative
learning was necessarily pragmatic. We knew
that we had to produce a practical assessment
for the classroom and we believed that it
should relate to progress in the creative arts
rather than to creative learning or creativity in
general. We believed that the assessment
would be stronger for being grounded in a
domain, or related domains13.
Relevant previous experience
CLPE’s previous experience as developers of
the Primary Language Record (Barrs et al,
1988), and our involvement in related
developments in the USA, meant that we had
ample experience of developing a viable
teacher assessment system in literacy. After a
year’s trial in a group of 50 schools, the
Primary Language Record had been used in
500 schools across the Inner London
Education Authority. In a revised form it had
also been extensively used as part of the state
assessment system in California. We had
therefore confronted some of the key issues
involved in the assessment of complex skills
and processes, and had successfully worked
with teachers across London and in other
education systems to develop their skills in
observation-based assessment.
As part of this work we had developed a
system of moderation and had consulted
leading experts in the field such as Mary
James and Royce Sadler on the moderation
model to be implemented. We had tested this
model in the UK, and it had been further
implemented and tested in California where it
had been the subject of several annual
evaluation reports and a doctoral study
(Hallam, 2000).
In the field of creative arts learning, we had
carried out two relevant pieces of research for
Creative Partnerships in London. In one
project, Animating Literacy (Ellis & Safford,
2005) we had worked with teacher
researchers in eight London primary schools to
look at the effects on their practice and on
children’s learning, of working closely with arts
partners on literacy-related arts projects. In the
13 In this we were supported by the experienced guidance of Professor Mary James, head of the Teaching and Learning Research
Programme at the Institute of Education, University of London, who was a member of our steering group.
76
Creative learning
other study, Many Routes to Meaning (Safford
& Barrs, 2005) we had looked across these 8
different sites so as to be able to identify the
success factors in these partnerships, and to
analyse how children’s learning and teachers’
practice was changed by their involvement in
particular arts projects. This work meant that
we had extensive experience to bring to the
development of the CLA. In Many Routes to
Meaning we had identified the need to grasp
the assessment nettle in relation to creative
arts learning.
Process of development
The development process took place in three
stages:
• Carrying out a research review, establishing
underpinning principles, the shape of the
assessment tool and a pack of prototype
materials (Spring Term 2006)
• A short trial of the materials in a small group
of schools, allowing for revision before the
pilot (Summer Term 2006)
• A year-long pilot (including a moderation
meeting) with an expanded number of
schools, which informed the ongoing
development and the final revision of the
CLA before publication (September 2006July 2007).
In creating the framework, we knew that it had
to be a development that fitted the times. It
had to be manageable and sufficiently
informative for teachers to want to use it
despite its status as a non-statutory
assessment tool.
Consequently, we needed to ensure that
paperwork was kept to a minimum without
compromising its value as a process for
informing the teacher about both children’s
progress and the effectiveness of the
curriculum provision. We were faced with a
choice of a) applying the framework to the
whole class by simplifying the demands (and
so risk making it reductive as an instrument) or
b) developing an in-depth instrument but not
applying it to the whole class. We decided to
focus on a small sample of children (between
three and six) to represent the range of
achievement in the class. It is a sampling
approach we had regularly used in
professional and school development projects
with positive outcomes for the learning
achievement of all children, not only those
sampled.
We decided that the assessment framework
should relate to the arts subjects in the
National Curriculum (NC), as a way of
anchoring the ‘slippery’ and marginalised area
of creative learning. This would help to
strengthen the link between planning and
assessment and prompt teachers to revisit the
NC documentation for arts subjects, so often
eclipsed by the focus on core subjects. Basing
a five-point scale of progress (see CLA Scale
– figure 1) on the NC statements of attainment
for arts subjects made visible the common
structure underpinning the NC assessment. A
strong link with the NC was important for
connecting the CLA framework, and a focus on
creative learning, to the mainstream
curriculum.
Creative learning
77
Figure 1 CLA Scale
Creative Learning Scale
Level 1
Children play with
creative materials and
elements and use
them to express
feelings and ideas.
They practise simple
skills, exploring
possibilities.
Children begin to
recognise and
describe some
creative effects.
They describe what
they think and feel
about their own and
others’ work.
Date
Level 2
Children develop their
imagination, exploring
and investigating the
possibilities within a
creative medium.
They choose different
elements to create
different effects. They
expand their range of
skills and begin to
draw on and vary their
use in appropriate
ways.
Children recognise
that different elements
and processes are
involved in a creative
work.
They comment on
differences in their
own and others’ work
and suggest ways of
improving it.
Class
Year
Level 3
Children work with
increasing personal
involvement,
independence and
creativity. They
communicate ideas
through a particular art
form, combining
different elements and
using them
expressively in a
creative work.
They select and use
skills and techniques
appropriately with
growing control.
Children discuss the
way meanings can be
conveyed in a
particular medium.
They identify
similarities and
differences between
their own and others’
work, commenting on
intended effects. They
adapt and improve
their own work.
School
Level 4
Children develop
creativity and
imagination through
engaging in
increasingly complex
artistic projects. They
organise different
elements, techniques
and processes to
realise their ideas and
intentions in a
particular art form.
They consolidate a
growing range of skills
and use them with
increasing precision
and control.
Children discuss the
ideas and approaches
in creative work,
relating it to context.
They evaluate and
develop their work,
commenting on how
their intentions have
been achieved.
(taken from NC PoS, ATs for PE/Dance, Music, Art, English/Dra,a, D&T
The materials needed to encourage teachers
to look closely at the children’s learning
process as well as reflect on the end point or
end products of their activity. CLPE had
already developed a 5-strand learning
continuum which had proved a clear and
informing structure for reflecting on literacy
progress. This was further developed to
provide a model of creative learning
assessment, comprising the following six
strands (see CLA Continuum – figure 2):
78
Creative learning
Level 5
Children are
increasingly conscious
of the imaginative
possibilities in a
particular creative
medium. They select
and organise their
material to express
their ideas and
intentions, making
choices for different
purposes and to
create different effects.
They use skills with
precision, control and
fluency, combining
them appropriately
and effectively.
Children analyse how
meanings are
conveyed, with
increasing critical
awareness, drawing
on their knowledge
and understanding of
an art form and using
appropriate
vocabulary.
They reflect on their
learning and show
awareness of purpose
and context in refining
and developing their
own work.
© CLPE/CfBT July 2007
These strands formed the key headings within
the CLA observation framework (see CLA
Observation Framework – figure 3); glosses
were added under each heading to provide
guidance for teacher observations, for example:
Reflection and evaluation
e.g. responds to and comments on own and
others’ work, responds to artistic/creative
experiences, analyses and constructively
criticises work, reviews and evaluates own
progress
Figure 2 CLA continuum
confidence, independence, enjoyment
collaboration and communication
creativity
strategies and skills
knowledge and understanding
reflection and evaluation
Reflection, highlighted as a significant element
in the research review, was further
strengthened by the inclusion of portfolios of
work in the assessment model. Portfolios, in
addition to the observation framework and the
scale of progress, provided the third element in
the assessment (see CLA assessment map –
see figure 4). We designed a portfolio template
(see CLA portfolio template – see figure 5)
which could apply to individual, group or class
folders, or e-portfolios. Portfolios provided a
record of work, both in process and endproducts, together with children’s and
teachers’ comments, photographs, writing,
drawing, and video.
During the year-long pilot, the revised CLA
was road tested thoroughly in real time, in real
classrooms, in a range of primary schools.
This was a collaborative venture, with teachers
informing revisions along the way and helping to
shape the final instrument. The pilot teachers
were interviewed about the impact of the CLA
on their practice:
‘The framework helps you to view children’s
learning through a different lens: ‘the doing,’
listening to them as it happens, and the
product ‘the done’. It’s a more balanced
approach than just assessing the outcome.
You learn so much more about the child that
you can use to help them move forward.’
Teacher B
‘I could see what I was aiming for. It drew my
attention to the different ‘parts’ of creativity.
The scale has made me more aware of
planning time for reflection, evaluation and
commenting on others’ work.’ Teacher K
Creative learning
79
Figure 3 The Creative Learning Observation Framework
Teacher/TA
Year
Names(s)
Creative context
1 Confidence, independence, enjoyment
eg developing
• pleasure and enjoyment
• engagement and focus
• empathy and emotional involvement
• self motivation
2 Collaboration and communication
eg
• works effectively in a team
• contributes to discussion, makes suggestions
• listens and responds to others
• perseveres, overcomes problems
• communicates and presents ideas
3 Creativity
eg
• is imaginative and playful
• generates ideas, questions and makes connections
• risk-takes and experiments
• expresses own creative ideas using a range of artistic elements
4 Strategies and skills
eg
• identifies issues and explores options
• plans and develops a project
• demonstrates a growing range of artistic/creative skills
• uses appropriate subject specific skills with increasing control
5 Knowledge and understanding
eg
• awareness of different forms, styles, artistic and cultural traditions,
creative techniques
• uses subject specific knowledge and language with understanding
6 Reflection and evaluation
eg
• responds to and comments on own and others’ work
• responds to artistic/creative experiences
• analyses and constructively criticises work
• reviews and evaluates own progress
7 Areas for further development
You may need to refer to the NC PoS and ATs
© CLPE/CfBT July 2007
80
Creative learning
Date
Date
Figure 4 Map of CLA System
Map of Creative Learning Assessment system (CLA)
SEF
Teacher records
• CL Observation Framework
3+ per year for focus
individuals/groups
with related examples of
children’s work
Portfolios of work
Individual/group/class
Selection of children’s project work
Reflective commentary
- children/teachers/parents
• CL Scale levels (2/3 per year)
for the whole class
Group/class
project work
Dated samples of work
including:
Photos/audio/video
drawings/diagrams/writing
© CLPE/CfBT July 2007
Creative learning
81
Figure 5 CLA Portfolio Template
Portfolio example
Possible forms:
An A2 book
A Learning Wall
e-portfolio
(individual/group/whole class)
Process:
Developed together with children over time (selection, reflection)
Sample page:
Description of activity
Child/teacher scribe
Teacher
annotation
What
Who
What it shows
Decisions made...
because
Teacher
Comment
Children’s writing/talk/planning
Children’s
writing/questions
Children’s
drawing
Teacher
Comment
Reflective commentary: Child(ren)
Most pleased with
Might change/why...
• Shared writing activity
• Child written/teacher scribed...
Photo of children’s
work
Children’s
diagram
Parents’
Comments
Reflective commentary: Teacher/TA
Significant areas of learning eg collaboration
and communication
Next steps
Evaluative
© CLPE/CfBT July 2007
82
Creative learning
Using the CLA observation
framework
The CLA framework allows teachers space to
record what they are noticing while children
are working on a creative project – it asks
questions like:
• In what ways are children able to take risks
and experiment in their learning?
• Do they generate ideas, questions and
make connections?
• Are there examples of responding to and
commenting on their own and others’ work?
Teachers found the open framework flexible
yet supportive in helping them to look closely
at how children were learning in different arts
subjects (classroom projects included painting,
sculpture, construction, animation, drama,
dance and literature). They saw it as an
opportunity to find out what children know and
can do and as a way of developing a deeper
knowledge and understanding of individuals
and their approaches to learning.
Within this paper we can only give a glimpse
of the CLA in use in the classroom. In the
following example, a teacher at a school in
Lambeth describes how the CLA helped her to
observe one aspect of children’s arts learning:
subject knowledge and understanding.
‘The teaching of the arts in its diverse forms
can be a challenge, as many primary
teachers do not have formal art training.
The CLA provided me with a clear
framework for thinking about what I needed
to build into my planning. The project
encouraged, though did not depend on, the
involvement of arts partners. An artist and
actor were involved in three of our projects
(the Bastet Cat sculpture, watercolour
painting and improvisation based on Zoo by
Anthony Browne). They did not lead the
projects or replace my role as the teacher.
Instead they worked alongside,
demonstrating and modelling the activities
and working with the children in small
groups. The involvement of the arts partner
impacted on my professional development,
I was learning alongside the children. As I
developed my skills and knowledge, I was
more empowered and informed to teach
and assess the children’s subject
knowledge and understanding.
My vocabulary and explanations became
more specific and explicit; I was using the
technical language of the subject with
greater confidence and understanding.
Gradually the children’s talk also become
more skilled: they took on the patterns of
talk appropriate to the artistic context,
began to use subject-specific language and
expressed their thinking more clearly and
with greater focus.
“I used the sculpting tools, cutting,
scooping, smoothing my statue. Can you
see the fibres in the clay? I think it’ll dry
quickly as it’s warm in here. But if it dries
too quickly - it might crack.” Lamarna (Age
8 years)
From my experience, children love to
experiment and use “big” words and the
creative forms are full of technical and
expressive language. By experiencing the
artistic form, the children were able to
understand the meaning of these “big”
words and use them purposefully.
Creative learning
83
“Look how the clay is sucking in the paint.
It’s because it’s porous it absorbs the
paint…Clay can look very realistic. I like
painting it [silver]… changing it from clay to
looking like metal. It’s good seeing my
sculpture develop. This bit’s very delicate…”
Elisha (age 8 years)
As the teacher, I had to identify what
experience the children needed and then
negotiate this with each artist. For example,
the children needed to develop their writing,
so we planned an improvisation project to
support this. I wanted the children to
explore their own ideas through drama
before writing, as well as to develop their
understanding and skills within this creative
form. Through mime, the visiting actor
helped children to imagine the experience
of caged zoo animals, to become the
animals and to improvise a story of escape.
Initially the actor concentrated on
demonstrating how a tiger, gorilla, and
penguin moved in a cage. The children’s
miming skills rapidly developed because
they were more informed and supported.
The sessions were videoed and the
difference between the first and third
sessions were fascinating, from a riot of
noise and movement to cathedral-like
silence as children watched each other
move with poise and expression. Following
this, children’s writing became far more
expansive and vivid. It was drama that
supported them in writing more powerfully
and convincingly, from inside the text.
The explicit headings in the observation
framework, and the descriptions of progress in
the CLA scale, enhanced teachers’ knowledge
of the different aspects of creative arts
84
Creative learning
learning. Many teachers reported an increased
confidence in teaching arts subjects because
of a deeper subject knowledge. The clear
model of creative learning in the framework
also supported explicit discussion of the
creative process with children, enabling them
to understand clearly what they needed to do.
Moderation
At the end of the pilot year, and following an
earlier preparatory session, the teachers who
had been involved in the pilot attended a
moderation meeting. The records and work of
seven focus children were moderated, and
each child’s work was moderated by at least
two pairs of teachers.
Teachers found no difficulty in arriving at a
judgement on the scale and it was apparent
that they were experienced in the process of
moderation from the NC assessment. 6 out of
the 7 records were successfully moderated
with both pairs of moderators in agreement
(and in 5 out of the 6 cases also in agreement
with teacher’s scale placement). This was a
very high level of agreement and an
encouraging first outing for the use of the scale
for teacher assessment. It also indicated that
most teachers had provided the moderators
with adequate evidence for them to arrive at a
judgement.
‘The moderation process was confirming. I
felt more confident about my judgements
afterwards.’ Teacher N
The moderation discussions pinpointed the
need for a range of evidence; records were
always more informative when more than just
one art form was represented – different
learning contexts provided richer and more
convincing evidence. This moderation meeting
suggested that those involved in the pilot had
developed a strong shared set of standards and
a shared assessment vocabulary:
• Reflection and evaluation was the key
strand for children and teachers, including
children’s self-assessment and peer
assessment. ‘Reflective time’ encourages
children to review their own learning and
needs to be built into the curriculum for
primary and secondary schools.
‘It made you appreciate other people’s
observations – how accurate observations,
that were related to the elements of the
scale, could record and convey to others a
clear picture of a child’s progress.’
Teacher B
• The cross curriculum possibilities of the
CLA were strongly signalled by teachers in
the project. Focusing on creative learning
enabled teachers to see the links with the
rest of children’s learning: risk-taking,
making choices, reflection and persistence
transfer across subjects.
Conclusions
Our experience of developing, trialling and
piloting the CLA has enabled us to see its
applications as a practical tool for teacher
assessment, professional development, and
promoting achievement.
• The CLA had a distinct effect on pedagogy,
which moved from a more didactic,
delivered curriculum to one that was
negotiated and collaborative. One effect for
children was that talk expanded
significantly. One effect for teachers was
that through close observation, teachers
became more aware of children as
learners.
The findings arising from the pilot year tended
• The focus on creative learning showed that
to cluster around the areas of assessment,
creative contexts empower children who are
children’s learning, teachers’ practice, teacher
not revealed as ‘achieving’ in academic
knowledge and curriculum, illustrating the reach
subjects or through current testing systems.
of assessment and its complex and multifaceted
• Teachers’ observations demonstrated that
nature (see CLA Star Chart of outcomes –
children need time, space and a more
figure 6). Below are some of the highlights.
integrated curriculum to make the important
• A key finding was that as an assessment
connections necessary for real learning
tool, teachers found it both manageable and
progress.
informative. They could make sampling work.
Focusing on a few children informed their
observation of all children and fed directly
into their planning. Teachers were able to
quickly internalise the criteria, the strands
and the prompts, for observation.
• The viability of the CLA as an assessment
model was confirmed by the moderation
process.
• Though regarded as a difficult area to
define and pin down (Craft, A. 2005; Craft,
et al. 2006), the moderation process
showed that teachers recognised the
elements of creativity described in the CLA
framework and scale, and were able to use
these to observe, assess and develop
children’s creative learning.
Creative learning
85
Figure 6 CLA Star Chart of Outcomes
The impact of the Creative Learning Assessment (CLA)
CLA framework structures observation of creative
learning development
CLA portfolio encourages teachers’ and children’s
reflection on progress
CLA scale provides model of creative learning development
CLA scale could apply to other areas of curriculum
Focusing on a few children informs observation of all
Highlights assessment of process and product
Highlights need for a range of evidence
Highlights need for a range of creative contexts
for assessment
Moderation highlighted need for exemplars to support
use of scale
Promotes self-assessment and peer assessment
Supports discussion with parents
Children judged as less academic achieve more in
creative learning contexts
Highlights individual capabilities/learning styles
Children work with more autonomy
Children make more choices and decisions
Generates more productive talk and discussion
Promotes reflection on own/others’ work
Children’s
learning
Assessment
CLA as a tool for
Teachers’
practice
• Teacher assessment
• Promoting achievement
• CPD
Highlights value of
reflective time
Highlights need for sustained
working time in creative projects
Encourages integrated
ways of working
Provides model of learning
that transfers across other
curriculum areas
Curriculum
Enhances knowledge of different
aspects of creative learning
Promotes understanding of
creative learning development
Enhances arts subject knowledge
Informs teacher observation
Promotes opportunities for
whole school development
Constraints
• Pressures of OFSTED and SATs impact on
school priorities
• School & curriculum organisation limit
implementation of CLA
• Initiative overload limits capacity to implement CLA
• Staff turnover –affects sustained involvement of schools
• Teachers’ concerns about manageability affect
implementation of CLA
© CLPE/CfBT July 2007
86
Creative learning
Teacher
knowledge
Makes possible a focus on
individual learners
Makes possible less didactic
practice
Helps teachers to move
children on
Supports planning and
provision
Supports explicit discussion
of creative process
Supports collaborative and
negotiated ways of working
Helps build relationships and
strengthen learning community
Supports reflective
conversations with children
and reflective practice
Enabling factors - positive contexts
• EAZ’s initial vision encouraged CLA development
• CLA provides evidence for S E F
• National initiatives (Every Child Matters/Early Years FS/PNS document/
KS3 curriculum revision) support the implementation of CLA
• GTC and other national discussions emphasise role of teacher assessment
• QCA emphasis on broad and balanced curriculum supports
implementation of CLA
• National focus on personalised learning supports CLA approach
• National focus on creativity supports use of CLA
In developing this assessment framework in
partnership with teachers, we have given
recognition to the complex, dynamic and
creative nature of learning and teaching. We
are encouraged by the response of teachers
and head teachers in the project and the
interest shown by CP, QCA and the TDA.
To build on this work, we hope to develop
further projects including:
• Disseminating the findings of the
development project more widely, through
courses, conferences and publications.
• Disseminating the use of the CLA materials
more widely, within local authorities and
internationally, including collaborations with
national organisations such as Creative
Partnerships. We have already begun this
work by working in an intensive four-month
project with a group of schools in Lambeth.
Teachers in this project have strongly
endorsed the value of using the CLA. One
project teacher commented: “I’m really
learning as a teacher to be much more
open and confident in my teaching.”
• The CLA may have wider uses – for
example in professional development and
initial training – and we shall continue to
explore these uses.
The model of learning and development on
which the CLA is based has proved to have a
high recognition factor among project teachers
who have found it very helpful in considering
both children’s learning and their own
pedagogy. It has enabled them both to make
creative skills a fundamental part of their
classrooms, and to understand how they can
be developed. We believe that this
assessment helps to put creativity at the heart
of the curriculum.
Creative learning
87
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Creative learning
89
creative
Learning
Edited by Julian Sefton-Green
In February 2008 Creative Partnerships convened a seminar of experts
to tease out and investigate the notion of creative learning.
This booklet publishes the papers presented at this event and a more
general discussion. The essays lay out a series of challenges and
contexts for Creative Partnerships and the creative and education
sectors in general.
While the authors may not offer solutions to all of the challenges they
raise, in exploring and unpicking the notion of creative learning they
model the essence of the process as it plays out in schools – each
author refreshes and renews the interrogation of an idea in the same
way creative practitioners, teachers and young people might re-imagine
the curriculum within schools.
ISBN 978 0 7287 1413 7
© Arts Council England, September 2008
To download this publication, go to www.creative-partnerships.com